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What you say is very true. Everything seems very remote to us. It's really hard to believe that everybody else in the world doesn't just want to hop in the car and go buy a new TV or simply go shopping and buy a few silly things for the house, a truly harmless pleasure. I honestly don't know why Muslims don't want to do this - it would be so much nicer if Muslims just wanted to go shopping and not kill and dominate us all. But the reality is that the latter is their goal, and it's almost impossible for us to understand that.

I think there is another issue as well. Many years ago a priest said to me that he thought that Christianity (and he was talking about Catholicism in particular when he said this) had become or was becoming 'too easy'. He meant this in the sense that it didn't demand anything from the individual anymore. I think he meant that sermons etc. had become kind of PC in order to avoid offending anyone and that we weren't challenging ourselves enough. In that context he said that he thought that was what was behind the appeal of some of the 'Eastern' religions that some youth were gravitating toward. It gave them a sense of meaning because it asked something from them.

That's a long-winded way of saying that whereas I totally agree with you that it would be wonderful if the Islamic radicals could see the beauty and worth in simple pleasures, I think it is equally true that we need to step back a bit and think about just what is the meaning in our lives. Probably many people think that the young men and women who have died in Iraq died 'without meaning', but to me nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that even though they died young, they died attempting to achieve something very noble. When you contrast that with what many people fill their lives with, it becomes clear (at least in my opinion) that the lives without meaning are not the ones lost in places like Iraq.

I'm sorry. It's almost 1 am here and I'm getting into one of those late night philosophical moods.