UK hostages 'likely to be dead'

Religious extremism can justify any act in the name of religion.  It doesn't matter what philosophy is followed. 

Ah, yes, the famous-infamous "evil only happens to people who do evil". A form of thinking so primitive, so without appropriate boundaries, that .....its proponents, in fact, maintain that what happens is deserved, not morally, but in terms of the burn you get when you stick your fingers in the fire.

Just like, then, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he got his fingers burnt by the UN-sanctioned international force.

And, then George HW Bush almost got assassinated by Saddam. So, from then on we needed to invade, as another burning of the fingers was called for.

One can always maintain that the taking of the hostages is a direct response to some perceived evil, but there are moral limits to ways in which you can respond, depending on the relative innocence of the person you hold prisoner.

We could further argue that the Muslims had the obligation to stay out of Hindu India and not build mosques on the site of ancient Hindu temples that they had destroyed.

And, the famous Dome of the Rock, a mosque built by Christian Byzantine craftsmen on the site of the Temple of Solomon....wouldn't that be an "invasion", as well as a provocation against indigent Jews and the Jewish Christians who lived there?

By that logic, the Israelis building settlements on the West Bank are simply responding to the provocation/invasion of their lands by foreigners who were Muslim. Now, they seek justice, just a thousand years late.

We can go on and on about this invasion theory of yours, this "evil begets evil". All the countries of the east end of the Mediterranean were invaded by Muslims, their churches destroyed, nuns and monks killed.

One famous Muslim general used to deflower a nun every night right on the altar of the church.

So, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, the Christians there, at least, would be morally justified in taking hostages and then killing them?

Maybe the invasion of Europe by a civilian population of Muslims would also be considered something that was obviously "invasive" and then provocative of violence, not by Muslims, but by the resident Cartesian atheists and what remnants of Christianity remained?

I will be pleasantly surprised the day I actually find an argument based on facts instead of an emotionally-based mumbo jumbo of accusations from which the only inference possible was that America was not only "pure evil" but the only source of such in the world.

Mine are conjecture? 

Your entire line of so-called "reasoning" is always about how Americans are stupid, evil boobs, yet you are never called on your racist, ethnocentric bombast. Just stick any other name of a group in that "reasoning" other than American and you would be banned.

I wouldn't ban you, though. Your point of view has tremendous didactic value, and reminds me of so many people I have known. So, I am immune, as it were, and that would be, in my case, the result of hearing it all from the age of ten.

Show me one single, solitary fact and one single solitary line of actual reasoning based on facts. Just one fact. Just one line of reasoning based on facts, which means that the conjecture, based on an induction, is falsifiable/verifiable by reason of the next set of facts can be predicted from it.

Your last rhetorical flourish, "Looks like a pig", is exactly what I mean by "lack of reasoning".

That is rhetoric, not reasoning. It is childish logic, the epitome of knee-jerk, formatory reasoning, the kind that starts up inquisitions. Do you have any formal training in scholarship or scientific work?

If a person's education has caused him to lack the capacity to differentiate reasoning from rhetoric, or, as in Obama's case, the person was allowed to get away with one-sided reasoning, then to make even a partial about-face is very difficult and quite a blow to a person's vanity.

So, good luck.

And, remember: if it looks like knee-jerk, formatory pseudo-logic, then according to the knee-jerk formatory logic of "looks like a pig", it is knee-jerk, formatory logic.

Formatory logic is logic based on associations and names, as if context was never important and as if one quality had to exclude another. For example, when a gang member kills someone just for the colors they wear even when the person is not  gang member.