[thinktwice]

The Islamic religous nuts are making all religious nuts look bad. Why?

The Church of England -- in opposition to Tony Blair -- has joined the British public outcry against G.W. Bush's proposals to take out Saddam.

Even Michael Kinsley provides a hint as to the religious-ethic problem inherent in today's world. Kinsley, in his 9 Sept 2002 Time Magazine essay "How to live a rational life" esaay, he writes: ".... it's hard to be rational about the irrational. Who can guess what Osama bin Laden might want to try next? How can you discourage a suicide bomber who is looking forward to being dead ater killing you?"

Religious terrorists are today making all religious nuts look bad because our world needs a rational ethics, but all religions -- being irrational -- must join toether to fight that thought with vigor.

[gcruse]

Ideally, Islamic society is a theocracy. [from the article]

Well, if that's the best it can hope for,
it's not worth the West defending, is it?
I mean, liberty and all that.

[wretchard]

It is commonly thought that Westerners, or Christians at least, won't fight to the death. In my own family, at least, that isn't the case. One of my grand-uncles had his head lopped off by the Japanese Army, after he tried stopping them from raping a women, just months after being released from a concentration camp after the Bataan Death March.

An old anti-Japanese guerilla told me a story that rivalled Robert Shaw's monologue in Jaws. He led a guerilla band operating in Bulacan, some miles out of Manila. The Japanese rounded up all the military age males in the vicinity and lined them up on Calumpit bridge. The Japanese officer wanted to know who the guerilla leader was, and stopped to interrogate the man next to him in line because he was a known rank and filer. "If you tell me your officer's name, I will let you go", the Japanese officer said.

I won't go into the details, but the man refused, and the Japanese officer cut him to pieces a bit at a time, an ear here, a nose there, a finger there, hoping he would break. All that time, the man the Japanese sought was standing right next to the dying man, who never uttered a word. But it was the fact that he tried to maintain a posture of attention until his last breath that the guerilla leader best remembered.

The Assasins haven't got a chance. Just ask Todd Beamer's relatives.