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mamabearCali wrote:Like all of us have said you may have one or two people here and there that go insane that claim to be Christians. People are people.

Really?....the crusades.....we are bringing up something that happened 600+ years ago and was at least in part a reaction to the Muslim Invasion of Europe and the Balkans.

The Spanish Inquisition....that was a horror show and again was much more political than religious in nature and was again minimum 500+ years ago.

The KKK....what Christian doctrine are they trying to advance? I grant that there may be misguided Christians within their ranks, but as far as I know they are a racial group not a religious group.

Excellent questions. Couple of thoughts for your consideration. Anybody can claim to be part of any religion. Others may disagree with their claim but the is no way to change the belief of those who claim it. Some claim things for ideologic reasons, some for personal or political gain but the claim itself becomes the difficult issue. We could even go so far as try to explore the religious teachings that they were raised in. It is no secret that Christian doctrine encompasses a pretty broad set of interpretations and we should expect the same from other religions and some will be more extreme than others.

So to the points you raised. Yes the crusades still get mentioned. Historical grievances play a role. In any event as long as it advancws the aims of the person raising the issue, they become fuel for the fire.

The Spanish Inquisition is an apt analogy precisely for the reason you cited. It is a very clear example of the Church exerting it's control over the lives of everyday people and controlling the government. It exerted virtually unchecked power and was manipulated to achieve the goals of the Church at the time. Sounds fairly similar to what's happening in the Muslim world.

Your point on the KKK made my inquisitive, so I googled Christian philosphy of the KKK. I got lots of hits and number two was their Homepage. On it they define themselves as a white Christian organization. I didn't drill down any further into their stuff but it is an example of my first point. Only when the majority have denied the validity of the claim to the point that amost all recoginize the claim for it's reality, can we hope for change.

TAM, I see the difference, however justifying collateral damage, the death of civilians is problematic. Why, Because Terrorists are claiming the same principle, that in-order to harm US, killing US civilians as matter of collateral damage is acceptable. BTW, Terrorists even claim that killing innocent Muslims as collateral-damage is acceptable under the same principle. Terrorists or Extremists who call themselves Muslims would target Muslims who do not agree with their sick and deviant mentality first. I'm not justifying civilian deaths; I'm merely point out that they are a fact of war. You're conversing with someone whose mother survived a nazi invasion, occupation, and a corresponding Allied invasion, full scale all out world war which raged back and forth across the city in which she lived.....not to diminish the tragedies of Lebanon, but a war that was MUCH more devastating and killed MANY more civilians than died in Lebanon. War is absolute heck. In WW2, civilians died in the millions as "collateral" casualties. I am not saying it is OK. I AM saying it is a fact of war. If I were a terrorist or resistance fighter, I would not bring the war home to my family. That is an act of indecency. Why would I not do that? I would not do it precisely because I would not want to risk that my wife and children would be killed by the missile aimed at me. "Men" (and I use quote marks deliberately) who drag their families into harm's way are no kind of man at all. It is the act of an immoral coward. Do I want their families to die? No, of course not. But I DO want the terrorist to die. Men who hide behind the skirts of their women are contemptible. It is easy to criticize without offering alternative solutions. In my original post where I mentioned the threat to women and children, it is NOT that I think they are legitimate targets, it is that I think that when they are collaterally killed in pursuit of a terrorist, the moral responsibility for that rests on the terrorist's shoulders........in the same way that if you and I rob a bank together and get in a gunfight with police, the deaths of any civilians caught in the crossfire is on OUR shoulders, and not on the police, regardless of who pulled the trigger.....because if there had been no bank robbery, there would be no civilian deaths. By extension, if there were no terrorism, there would be no pursuit of terrorists; and if there were no pursuit of terrorists, there would be no collateral killing of their families. The alternative is to simply do nothing and just absorb the terrorist attacks and move on. That's an unrealistic expectation.[/quote]
Answers in red above....[/quote]

I agree witht the rationale in your post TAM, but I do need to point out that as stated it is bit chauvinistic. Terrorists come in both sexes and the process for dealing with them should be applied uniformly. Anyone who hides behind an innocent is not the kind of humans we need to have among us.

One advantage the US has over the rest of the world is the ability to wilfully put history into the past and leave it there. We try to learn from the events of the past but with our focus on growth and the future, we mostly let the old grievances fade away ( well a certain event in the 1860's may be the exception). Travelling in Europe and the Middle East one sees countless examples of multi-generational greivance polishing. It may correlate to multi-generational housing models, I'm not sure, but many learn to hate from their elders. In times past this was not as dangerous to the world as it is today. Modern technology has made the world very small and far too immeadiate to allow the pattern to continue. I have often wondered if things continue down the path they are on, whether someone will decide that the only way to end it is to totally eliminate the opposition. As nuclear arms have percolated into the middle east the odds of somebody trying this has gone up. We could be looking at a crisis the will make the cuban missle crisis seem like the good old days. At least then the parties were rational enough to use their respective national good as decision point. Im not sure that this would happen in an area where religion drives the train.

mamabearCali wrote:It would be terrible if civilians were killed. I dont want that. However perhaps just perhaps a little bit of fear is in order here. Perhaps these dingbats would not act so irresponsibly if they thought that perhaps it would be their mother, father, wife, children, killed in a missile strike. Perhaps fear would moderate their actions then. on the idiots who did this and on our gov't gutless response.

These innocent civilians face an awful decision(s). Should they point out the radical terrorists who use their religion in order to achieve social and political power, and expose themselves to torture and murder for doing so? Or should they just hope hope that they aren't the collateral damage in a retalitory airstrike? And really who would they point the anarchists out to? Not a choice I would want to make, but one thing is for sure. There is a war going on inside Islam and unless those who hold a less radical view put a stop to the militants, it will move to engulf the world in ways beyond where we are now. We cannot settle the issue for them, they have to do it within their system.