Governments and religions *ARE* people. There are times where I think you have said the stupidist thing possible and then you keep typing. Individuals are the ones who killed the Jews, put pepper spray in the eyes of demonstrators, and just about everything else that gets done.
Yes, but these people were "just obeying orders", these orders in turn came from a government which, although it consists of individuals is much more than that, The whole problem with demcracy is that it merges the views of those that give it a mandate to govern into one huge fudge, anarchies give less structural potential for the "mob rule" seen in modern democracies. Also, by and large, governments in modern democracies are free to commit small evils without ever influencing their share of the vote, the bigger evils are the ones that get noticed by the electorate. Governments are just "collections of individuals", in the same way that a you are just "a load of assorted chemicals". To say something like that indicates a lack of understanding of the distinction between individual views and mob rule, I credit you with more intelligence than to ignore such a distinction Jim. Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"