Remember Ronald Reagan and his "Reaganomics"? Reagan espoused the "trickle-down" theory, supposedly scribbled on a napkin by the young (and previously relatively obscure) economist Arthur Laffer, with his "Laffer curve."
The idea was that tax cuts and other economic policies that would help large businesses and rich individuals get richer would ultimately benefit everybody, because the benefits to them would "trickle down" the ladder to lower income levels. The rising waters would float everybody's boat--or so the theory went.
What happened is that under Reagan, the U.S. national deficit rose to unprecedented levels--a fact that those on the Right who are lambasting Obama for a rising deficit are conveniently ignoring.
Now, since the numbers are in, we can see similarly that the Bush economic policies, such as the famous "Bush tax cuts" that are now up for renewal, and that had the most benefit for the rich, hurt the total U.S. national income.
Here is an article by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Reich on that subject:
www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/the-super-rich-get-richer_b_737792.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=092410&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BlogEntry
If you want to go into the economics of it more deeply (and you have patience), here is an article replete with tables (in .pdf format).
www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/CHAS-89LPZ9?OpenDocument
Here is an article that shows the lasting, systemic harm to America's economic structure that was done by Reagonomics:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-white/rethinking-reaganomics-wh_b_749839.html
Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Mormons and Marriage
With a big news story about federal raids on the compound of a fundamentalist Mormon sect a while ago, and a more recent TV program about a polygamist family, the practice of polygamy associated with some Mormons has been in the news.
As you may know, mainstream Mormonism at one time not only tolerated polygamy but actively encouraged and preached it. For example, Joseph Smith, with difficulty, persuaded Brighman Young to have multiple wives.
Then, at one point--to end federal pressure on Mormons and further the incorporation of Utah into the Union--Mormon leaders suddenly and miraculously had a new "revelation" that told them that they should renounce polygamy.
I'd like to tell you what I think. Aside from questions of what it does to the birth rate, I am fine with polygamy. I think people, Mormon or otherwise, should be permitted to do what they want, and it's no skin off my nose.
But there's a huge irony here. Mormons would like others to keep their hands off marriage--yet they won't do the same in return. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) was a very big financial supporter of Proposition 8 in California, which was a ballot initiative to end same-sex marriage.
To any Mormons out there: Hey, let's make a deal. I'll advocate letting you guys do whatever you want, marriage-wise--you can have multiple wives, multiple husbands, I couldn't care less. And in return, how about you keeping hands off same-sex marriage?
Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
As you may know, mainstream Mormonism at one time not only tolerated polygamy but actively encouraged and preached it. For example, Joseph Smith, with difficulty, persuaded Brighman Young to have multiple wives.
Then, at one point--to end federal pressure on Mormons and further the incorporation of Utah into the Union--Mormon leaders suddenly and miraculously had a new "revelation" that told them that they should renounce polygamy.
I'd like to tell you what I think. Aside from questions of what it does to the birth rate, I am fine with polygamy. I think people, Mormon or otherwise, should be permitted to do what they want, and it's no skin off my nose.
But there's a huge irony here. Mormons would like others to keep their hands off marriage--yet they won't do the same in return. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) was a very big financial supporter of Proposition 8 in California, which was a ballot initiative to end same-sex marriage.
To any Mormons out there: Hey, let's make a deal. I'll advocate letting you guys do whatever you want, marriage-wise--you can have multiple wives, multiple husbands, I couldn't care less. And in return, how about you keeping hands off same-sex marriage?
Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
Friday, September 24, 2010
Yet Another Homophobe Outed As Gay
If you follow the news, you've heard or read about Bishop Long, of a huge (25,000 member) African-American church in Georgia. This is a man who is a very vocal homophobe, and now he is accused of having had sex with (at latest count) four men from his congregation when they were adolescents.
This is just the latest of a long list. Remember these: Foley, Craig, Haggard? I think there have been several more that I can't recall at the moment.
I have to wonder, when will people stop listening to these people with credence and simply question whether the volume of their rhetoric is in proportion to their desire to cloak their own homosexuality?
Here is an article that is excellent and, in my opinion, gives a very good slant on the issue of homosexuality and the Bible.
http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-bishop-long-and-whats-long-overduer-for-christians/19645378
Update, August 26, 2011
Yet another instance to add to the list along with Sen. Craig, etc.--just the latest among many: An Indiana state senator, Phil Hinkle, arranged, via Craigslist, a liaison in a hotel room with a very young guy (either 20 or 18). He claims, "I am not gay."
Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
This is just the latest of a long list. Remember these: Foley, Craig, Haggard? I think there have been several more that I can't recall at the moment.
I have to wonder, when will people stop listening to these people with credence and simply question whether the volume of their rhetoric is in proportion to their desire to cloak their own homosexuality?
Here is an article that is excellent and, in my opinion, gives a very good slant on the issue of homosexuality and the Bible.
http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-bishop-long-and-whats-long-overduer-for-christians/19645378
Update, August 26, 2011
Yet another instance to add to the list along with Sen. Craig, etc.--just the latest among many: An Indiana state senator, Phil Hinkle, arranged, via Craigslist, a liaison in a hotel room with a very young guy (either 20 or 18). He claims, "I am not gay."
Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Does Education Make Us Liberal?
It's widely known that better-educated people tend to be more liberal—or "progressive," as we might prefer to say since certain segments have done their best to make liberal a dirty word.
And studies have shown this, studies that have broken down voting patterns in the electorate by groups according to years of education.
(Big and important parenthesis: Of course not all college graduates, or even advanced-degree holders, are automatically liberal. It seems to me that people with certain degrees are less likely to be liberal. For example, people with MBAs are, not surprisingly, quite pro-business and often conservative according to other parameters as well. Maybe engineers are not the most liberal sorts, either.)
But the liberally-educated are liberal. (Is it a coincidence that the word liberal has these two uses?) For a long time I've contemplated why this should be so. I think important components of that education which produces liberals are literature, anthropology, psychology, and logic.
Literature and the other arts, I think, are the cornerstone of all this. I think that people who have been made acquainted with literature have undergone several processes: They have had their minds opened to a wider variety of experience and thus perhaps been made to have a more relativistic and less absolutistic viewpoint. (Studying anthropology should do this, too.) They have been exposed to writers' wisdom as to much of life and human experience, such that the reader can be sitting and reading in the most isolated and even (dare I say?) backward time or place and even so, through reading, travel the world and gain experience and wisdom and knowledge of other places and times.
Many writers, filmmakers, and artists of every sort are forward thinkers. Thus the audience whom these artists reach becomes exposed to less conventional viewpoints and perhaps encouraged to question a lot of received ideas and "truths." Remember, if it hadn't been for the value of education and the disseminating of the ideas of the forward thinkers, the radicals, many of us would probably still believe that the Earth is flat.
Psychology, too, teaches us valuable things. The people who have taken even Psych 101 and have learned about human perception would never pay much heed to the idea of seeing Jesus' or the Virgin Mary's face on a tortilla.
Studying logic might make us more immune to being swayed by, say, political advertising that slams an individual, rather than keeping to the issues. (In logic this is known as the argumentum ad hominen, attack on the person.) Nor as easily swayed by a lot of people who use whatever platform they've got to stir people up by means of rhetoric which, when examined, proves not logically sound. There are a lot of demagogues and such who simply use propaganda that will work on the less wary and will be seen through by those who know more about argumentation. Propaganda was used so well by Göbbels in Nazi Germany but propaganda was not new then and it has not disappeared since.
It might be another subject, how powerful interests manage to recruit masses of people to the views they want them to have, and I have touched on this in other postings.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
And studies have shown this, studies that have broken down voting patterns in the electorate by groups according to years of education.
(Big and important parenthesis: Of course not all college graduates, or even advanced-degree holders, are automatically liberal. It seems to me that people with certain degrees are less likely to be liberal. For example, people with MBAs are, not surprisingly, quite pro-business and often conservative according to other parameters as well. Maybe engineers are not the most liberal sorts, either.)
But the liberally-educated are liberal. (Is it a coincidence that the word liberal has these two uses?) For a long time I've contemplated why this should be so. I think important components of that education which produces liberals are literature, anthropology, psychology, and logic.
Literature and the other arts, I think, are the cornerstone of all this. I think that people who have been made acquainted with literature have undergone several processes: They have had their minds opened to a wider variety of experience and thus perhaps been made to have a more relativistic and less absolutistic viewpoint. (Studying anthropology should do this, too.) They have been exposed to writers' wisdom as to much of life and human experience, such that the reader can be sitting and reading in the most isolated and even (dare I say?) backward time or place and even so, through reading, travel the world and gain experience and wisdom and knowledge of other places and times.
Many writers, filmmakers, and artists of every sort are forward thinkers. Thus the audience whom these artists reach becomes exposed to less conventional viewpoints and perhaps encouraged to question a lot of received ideas and "truths." Remember, if it hadn't been for the value of education and the disseminating of the ideas of the forward thinkers, the radicals, many of us would probably still believe that the Earth is flat.
Psychology, too, teaches us valuable things. The people who have taken even Psych 101 and have learned about human perception would never pay much heed to the idea of seeing Jesus' or the Virgin Mary's face on a tortilla.
Studying logic might make us more immune to being swayed by, say, political advertising that slams an individual, rather than keeping to the issues. (In logic this is known as the argumentum ad hominen, attack on the person.) Nor as easily swayed by a lot of people who use whatever platform they've got to stir people up by means of rhetoric which, when examined, proves not logically sound. There are a lot of demagogues and such who simply use propaganda that will work on the less wary and will be seen through by those who know more about argumentation. Propaganda was used so well by Göbbels in Nazi Germany but propaganda was not new then and it has not disappeared since.
It might be another subject, how powerful interests manage to recruit masses of people to the views they want them to have, and I have touched on this in other postings.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
Friday, September 17, 2010
What's Changed in the World. Part 5 - Computing
If computers have brought great changes in our lives, computing itself has changed. Fifty years ago, computers were owned only by the government, the military, universities, and large businesses. Computers were very large and required dedicated rooms that in turn had dedicated air-conditioning, because the heat that the computers generated was bad for the computers themselves and had to be removed. A modern computer—a laptop or desktop computer--that almost everyone in America can have, is many, many times more powerful than one of those old computers that filled a room.
I dealt with computers back before the day when it occurred to someone to hook up a TV screen to the computer. The computer's output (and sometimes input, as well) was to a TeleTypewriter, a big machine that—well, never mind, suffice it to say that this was a device that had been around for the purpose of receiving and printing out telegrams.
You'd write your program out, with a pen or pencil, on "IBM coding sheets." Then you'd have to sit down at a machine called a keypunch. You'd type in your program at this machine's keyboard. Every line of your program would result in the production of a punched card (called Hollerith cards or IBM cards).
A program of any complexity could be hundreds of punched cards. People writing and running programs would carry their stack of cards in a shoebox. (Don't even imagine what would happen if you dropped the box or spilled the cards!)
Then the stack of cards was fed into a "card reader." That finally got the program into the computer, and then the computer needed to be commanded to run it. For students such as I was, you had to wait your turn for your program to be run, and you'd get the printout of the program's output in a day or two!
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
I dealt with computers back before the day when it occurred to someone to hook up a TV screen to the computer. The computer's output (and sometimes input, as well) was to a TeleTypewriter, a big machine that—well, never mind, suffice it to say that this was a device that had been around for the purpose of receiving and printing out telegrams.
You'd write your program out, with a pen or pencil, on "IBM coding sheets." Then you'd have to sit down at a machine called a keypunch. You'd type in your program at this machine's keyboard. Every line of your program would result in the production of a punched card (called Hollerith cards or IBM cards).
A program of any complexity could be hundreds of punched cards. People writing and running programs would carry their stack of cards in a shoebox. (Don't even imagine what would happen if you dropped the box or spilled the cards!)
Then the stack of cards was fed into a "card reader." That finally got the program into the computer, and then the computer needed to be commanded to run it. For students such as I was, you had to wait your turn for your program to be run, and you'd get the printout of the program's output in a day or two!
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Guns for Everyone!
As you probably heard, there was another one of those shootings today, this one at Johns Hopkins University hospital, and this one also with hostage-taking.
Add this to the growing list that includes The Discovery Channel, Ft. Hood, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University. (And a church; and the TV news mentioned four similar incidents at hospitals.) The list is getting so long that it's hard to recall them all.
People in other countries are saying, "Those crazy Americans and their guns." Yes, we are crazy, and guns are too prevalent in America. Shootings like these seldom occur in other countries.
Extreme gunowners' rights advocates want every American to have a gun in his house, so that he will be "protected" in the event of a home invasion. And they want everybody to openly carry a hand gun.
The logic, "Well, the bad guys have guns, so I need one, too, to protect myself," simply means an arms race.
When homeowners have guns in their homes, a variety of accidents can happen. Just a couple days ago, here in Chicago, a boy shot his brother with a rifle; and supposedly the gun had been properly locked up in a cabinet. There have of course been other, similar accidents. All those guns ready to be aimed and fired at intruders and burglars: they're going to be mistakenly fired at spouses, parents, children.
And these shootings like the one today show that our easily-obtained guns are too often finding their way into the hands of those with mental problems. Anyone with some irrational grudge or rage, anyone with delusions, can get a gun and go and shoot whoever it is he perceives as causing his problems.
Again to look at Americans with an outsider's view: We have a Wild West mentality. It is macho to have a gun.
In fact I literally blame Hollywood Western movies for this: They glamorized the gunslinger, gun-toter, gunfighter. John Wayne and other heroes of Westerns became the American ideal of masculinity. Someone said that John Wayne redefined the masculine in America.
So, no wonder every gang member and every other punk in America wants a gun. When guns are easy to obtain and easy to own, it's more likely they're going to be used. We here in Chicago are having a problem that has been escalating to extreme, shocking proportions: Hundreds of people a year are killed in drive-by shootings and other gang-related violence. Often it's young, innocent children who get caught in the crossfire. The residents of certain areas are literally killing one another. Imagine what it's like to live in one of those areas and to live with your life in danger every day. Supposedly only soldiers in wartime have to live like that.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
Add this to the growing list that includes The Discovery Channel, Ft. Hood, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University. (And a church; and the TV news mentioned four similar incidents at hospitals.) The list is getting so long that it's hard to recall them all.
People in other countries are saying, "Those crazy Americans and their guns." Yes, we are crazy, and guns are too prevalent in America. Shootings like these seldom occur in other countries.
Extreme gunowners' rights advocates want every American to have a gun in his house, so that he will be "protected" in the event of a home invasion. And they want everybody to openly carry a hand gun.
The logic, "Well, the bad guys have guns, so I need one, too, to protect myself," simply means an arms race.
When homeowners have guns in their homes, a variety of accidents can happen. Just a couple days ago, here in Chicago, a boy shot his brother with a rifle; and supposedly the gun had been properly locked up in a cabinet. There have of course been other, similar accidents. All those guns ready to be aimed and fired at intruders and burglars: they're going to be mistakenly fired at spouses, parents, children.
And these shootings like the one today show that our easily-obtained guns are too often finding their way into the hands of those with mental problems. Anyone with some irrational grudge or rage, anyone with delusions, can get a gun and go and shoot whoever it is he perceives as causing his problems.
Again to look at Americans with an outsider's view: We have a Wild West mentality. It is macho to have a gun.
In fact I literally blame Hollywood Western movies for this: They glamorized the gunslinger, gun-toter, gunfighter. John Wayne and other heroes of Westerns became the American ideal of masculinity. Someone said that John Wayne redefined the masculine in America.
So, no wonder every gang member and every other punk in America wants a gun. When guns are easy to obtain and easy to own, it's more likely they're going to be used. We here in Chicago are having a problem that has been escalating to extreme, shocking proportions: Hundreds of people a year are killed in drive-by shootings and other gang-related violence. Often it's young, innocent children who get caught in the crossfire. The residents of certain areas are literally killing one another. Imagine what it's like to live in one of those areas and to live with your life in danger every day. Supposedly only soldiers in wartime have to live like that.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Animals 4, Humans 0
We just had yet another in a chain of incidents in which an animal has attacked its trainer. In this latest, a lion attacked a trainer and bit him on the leg.
Recall not that long ago an orca (wrongly called a "killer whale") pulled his trainer into the pool where she drowned. And the news today, reviewing such incidents, reminds us that there was a bear that attacked its trainer, and there was the time that Roy Horn (of Siegfried and Roy) was attacked by the tiger that was part of his act.
In these cases I'm almost rooting for the animals. Not that I want to see humans hurt; I definitely don't. But these are wild animals, basically doing what is part of their nature.
Animals shouldn't have trainers (except for domesticated animals). Why? Because they should not be in captivity. They do not exist for the amusement of humans. These marine-animal shows particularly upset me. They are usually money-making enterprises and they simply exploit their animals for profit. They would have us believe that their animals are well cared for and happy. Well, it is not hard to dispute the second of those claims. Dolphins in captivity sometimes commit suicide—which they can do by not coming up for air, in effect holding their breath until they die.
Also, when dolphins are captured (usually off the coast of Japan), very large number of them are simply slaughtered in the process. The water runs red with their blood. These are intelligent animals and deserve to be treated like the high life forms that they are.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
Recall not that long ago an orca (wrongly called a "killer whale") pulled his trainer into the pool where she drowned. And the news today, reviewing such incidents, reminds us that there was a bear that attacked its trainer, and there was the time that Roy Horn (of Siegfried and Roy) was attacked by the tiger that was part of his act.
In these cases I'm almost rooting for the animals. Not that I want to see humans hurt; I definitely don't. But these are wild animals, basically doing what is part of their nature.
Animals shouldn't have trainers (except for domesticated animals). Why? Because they should not be in captivity. They do not exist for the amusement of humans. These marine-animal shows particularly upset me. They are usually money-making enterprises and they simply exploit their animals for profit. They would have us believe that their animals are well cared for and happy. Well, it is not hard to dispute the second of those claims. Dolphins in captivity sometimes commit suicide—which they can do by not coming up for air, in effect holding their breath until they die.
Also, when dolphins are captured (usually off the coast of Japan), very large number of them are simply slaughtered in the process. The water runs red with their blood. These are intelligent animals and deserve to be treated like the high life forms that they are.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
Blame Obama?
The news today shows that President Obama and the Democrats have very low approval ratings. Also, people do not think Obama has improved the economy, and they also (by 90%, according to the polls) feel the economy is in bad shape.
It's a year and a half since Obama took office. When he took office, the U.S. and in fact the world economy was on the verge of total and disastrous collapse, as many economists and other scholars have said. Obama acted very quickly to enact measures (mainly the now infamous "bail-outs") that staved off that collapse that would have ruined us, as individuals and as a country.
It's true that not everything is rosey. There are mixed indicators of the state of the economy. Many economists say the economy is improving; it's growing, albeit slowly and not quickly enough to appease Obama's critics.
Obama is not to blame for the economic problems of our country. A year and a half should not be too difficult a period to remember back. Many problems were caused by (1) the banking industry, which had made loans ("subprime loans") to many, many people who could not afford them; and (2) by Wall Street, with innovative and overly complicated new investment vehicles (generally those called "derivatives"). (3) Lack of government regulation and oversight permitted (1) and (2) to occur. This deregulation of the financial sector was not Obama's doing nor even George W. Bush's, but went back through several presidential administrations.
No one should expect any miraculous turnaround in the time that Obama has been president. When the U.S. was in the grips of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt instituted many programs to stimulate the economy, but full recovery from the Depression did not occur until there was the stimulus to industry provided by arming for World War II.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
It's a year and a half since Obama took office. When he took office, the U.S. and in fact the world economy was on the verge of total and disastrous collapse, as many economists and other scholars have said. Obama acted very quickly to enact measures (mainly the now infamous "bail-outs") that staved off that collapse that would have ruined us, as individuals and as a country.
It's true that not everything is rosey. There are mixed indicators of the state of the economy. Many economists say the economy is improving; it's growing, albeit slowly and not quickly enough to appease Obama's critics.
Obama is not to blame for the economic problems of our country. A year and a half should not be too difficult a period to remember back. Many problems were caused by (1) the banking industry, which had made loans ("subprime loans") to many, many people who could not afford them; and (2) by Wall Street, with innovative and overly complicated new investment vehicles (generally those called "derivatives"). (3) Lack of government regulation and oversight permitted (1) and (2) to occur. This deregulation of the financial sector was not Obama's doing nor even George W. Bush's, but went back through several presidential administrations.
No one should expect any miraculous turnaround in the time that Obama has been president. When the U.S. was in the grips of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt instituted many programs to stimulate the economy, but full recovery from the Depression did not occur until there was the stimulus to industry provided by arming for World War II.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
Religious War, Episode Number-- Well, Some Thousand
As practically everyone must be aware, the pastor of a small, fringe church in Gainesville, Florida, Terry Jones, has inflamed (I use the word advisedly) world-wide controversy with his plan to burn 200 copies of the Quran on September 11, which is, of course, the anniversary of the famous "9/11" attacks. The 9/11 attacks are viewed (and I would not say wrongly) as attacks by Islam against not only the U.S. but the Christian West or Christianity.
This is the latest battle in an Islam-West (or Islam-Christianity) conflict that goes back not simply nine years to September 11, 2001, but 800 or 900 years, to the Crusades.
To refresh your memory of the history you learned: the Holy Land, so-called, was in the hands of Muslims, who had been conquering more and more of the Byzantine Empire of which it was part; and the Pope preached the Crusade—in fact there were four Crusades—to inspire (or incite) Christian knights to "recapture" the Holy Land for Christianity.
And—just to set the record straight, because I believe I heard someone getting it backwards—the Muslims then considered—and probably still consider—any and all non-Muslims to be "infidels."
So we've had 900 years of conflict, of hatred, of intolerance. In modern times we've also had Christians and Muslims battling each other in Lebanon and in the former Yugoslavia. These were all at least in part religious wars.
And if you want to look more broadly still, it's not only Christians and Muslims who have been at each others' throats. There have been wars between Catholics and Protestants--in Northern Ireland in modern times and elsewhere in earlier times.
And I am sure that the conflicts stemming from religion are as old as the invention of religion itself in human history.
I almost tend to think that there is something inherent in religion that is to blame. Every religion claims to be the "true" one, and fosters in its followers a certain smugness in the fact that they are the followers of the true faith.
And since we are right, we are justified in smiting all those who follow another religion, because theirs are false gods. In Old Testament times and in Classical Antiquity, a war between two peoples was a conflict between their respective gods, and the outcome indicated whose god was stronger or was the "true" god.
Yes, I blame religion for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, over the centuries, and for much human suffering. Religion has done some good, I'd admit; but its inherent tendency to demarcate humanity into "we" and "they," which I've commented on before, has to devolve itself into conflict, and often conflict of the most brutal and protracted kind.
Here is a link to a good article:
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/analysis-pastor-terry-jones-plan-to-burn-quran-latest-in-long-line-of-religious-fire-starters/19623998
If there is a God, I have a suggestion for Him: On September 11, let there be a very hard rain, a deluge, in Gainesville, Florida, and drown out Pastor Jones' bonfire of hate.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
This is the latest battle in an Islam-West (or Islam-Christianity) conflict that goes back not simply nine years to September 11, 2001, but 800 or 900 years, to the Crusades.
To refresh your memory of the history you learned: the Holy Land, so-called, was in the hands of Muslims, who had been conquering more and more of the Byzantine Empire of which it was part; and the Pope preached the Crusade—in fact there were four Crusades—to inspire (or incite) Christian knights to "recapture" the Holy Land for Christianity.
And—just to set the record straight, because I believe I heard someone getting it backwards—the Muslims then considered—and probably still consider—any and all non-Muslims to be "infidels."
So we've had 900 years of conflict, of hatred, of intolerance. In modern times we've also had Christians and Muslims battling each other in Lebanon and in the former Yugoslavia. These were all at least in part religious wars.
And if you want to look more broadly still, it's not only Christians and Muslims who have been at each others' throats. There have been wars between Catholics and Protestants--in Northern Ireland in modern times and elsewhere in earlier times.
And I am sure that the conflicts stemming from religion are as old as the invention of religion itself in human history.
I almost tend to think that there is something inherent in religion that is to blame. Every religion claims to be the "true" one, and fosters in its followers a certain smugness in the fact that they are the followers of the true faith.
And since we are right, we are justified in smiting all those who follow another religion, because theirs are false gods. In Old Testament times and in Classical Antiquity, a war between two peoples was a conflict between their respective gods, and the outcome indicated whose god was stronger or was the "true" god.
Yes, I blame religion for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, over the centuries, and for much human suffering. Religion has done some good, I'd admit; but its inherent tendency to demarcate humanity into "we" and "they," which I've commented on before, has to devolve itself into conflict, and often conflict of the most brutal and protracted kind.
Here is a link to a good article:
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/analysis-pastor-terry-jones-plan-to-burn-quran-latest-in-long-line-of-religious-fire-starters/19623998
If there is a God, I have a suggestion for Him: On September 11, let there be a very hard rain, a deluge, in Gainesville, Florida, and drown out Pastor Jones' bonfire of hate.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
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