At 8:11 PM -0700 9/20/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

At 04:57 PM 9/19/04 -0700, James A. Donald wrote:

...

But the Saudi Arabian elite, of among which Bin Laden was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, are not getting screwed over.

1. you don't get religion 2. UBL's mom was a low-caste yemeni, dig?

Actually, UBL's *dad* was a low-caste Yemeni, too. And your point is? Like all cultural components, religion is about the allocation of scarce resources. War is the penultimate form of this kind of allocation. In fact, the actual content of religion is immaterial, except where it affects the ability of a culture to raise the resources to fight a *war*, which, as Hanson puts it so nicely in "Carnage and Culture", is everything. Because of its inability to raise the resources to fight a modern war -- capital (by several orders of magnitude, go look at a map with GDP superimposed), and, most important the freedom to create new *science* to produce that capital with, virtually out of thin air -- Islam is a dead religion. It just doesn't know it yet. UBL, and the entire Islamic culture, will eventually go the way of Hannibal and Carthage. Carthage sacrificed children to their gods too. Go for it, I say... Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'