At 10:42 AM 10/5/01 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:

Just another example of the trend that you don't need to be religious to exercise religious bigotry. Hating other people and insulting their values doesn't require either understanding them or having values of your own. It's frustrating how rabidly intolerant a lot of ostensibly socially liberal people are.

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Optimizzin Al-gorithm <oa@acm.org> wrote :

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Christians need to start cultivating a martyrdom culture/generation. Maybe a videogame where you win by blowing yourself up and taking out a lot of drugdealers^H^H^H^Hmoslems^H^H^H^Hwhatever the fuck the bogeymen du jour are.

Actually this comment isn't about religions ---its about what happens when a more aggressive culture meets one less so. The losers get to run casinos at best. Guns germs & steel. And suicide bombers. A culture that has them has advantages over a risk-averse one. My commentary also alluded to the demonization of the enemy, done by the 'faithful' of both flavors. I was sarcastic, ie expressing author's disdain for this demonization. This follows my black humor, which is cynicism about the actual reality of competing-civilizations (named by their dominant religion) and the way they (ab)use their (young male) subscribers. Thanks for the opportunity to clarify.