@Mike - do you watch 'Southpark'? they do a great take on a 'rabble mentality' in a few episodes where someone stirs up some sore point and next thing the whole town goes crazy. this if very similar.
another thing that bothers me is this anti-muslim hysteria. unsurprisingly, many who fear muslim countries have little or no experience of living with muslims. i have worked in muslim countries and really, people are people everywhere. i found them no more hard or easy to live and work with than anyone else. i do agree there are some regimes that are worthy of concern but that is the case with a few places, religion aside. we absolutely will do ourselves no favour if we just take a stance opposite to that of saudi arabia, in that 'well, if they wont allow our churches, we won't allow their mosques' etc
The best remedy against this is quality education. One big cause is poverty. Here's one big eye opener!! Check this out !!! http://money.msn.com/family-money/the-poorest-counties-in-america Most of these counties are in the U.S. bible belt. When you've got no money and your main source of hope is in the hands of evangelists or mullahs you're on the fast track to intolerance and finding easy and destructive reasons that justify your state of being. One big mistake you can make now is ignoring the evangelical lobby and toxic religious pressure groups. Without them GW Bush would never have been elected back in 2000 and perhaps the costly and unjustified IRAQI invasion could have been avoided. In fact, this war/disguised cruisade was so expensive that GW had to artifically stimulate the economy in the US by offering ridiculously cheap housing for everyone (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), thus leading to its catastrophic collapse in 2008 and spreading the virus to the entire planet. A superpower with a religion disease is a catastrophic mix.
The poverty aspect is one im very interested in, my wife is one of 12 children, two of which have recently become hard core god botherers, to the point where they will not set foot in the house if it has an Xmas tree, dont do Xmas lunch/dinner with the rest of the family.(tree is pagan symbol, feast is saturnalia......) These two otherwise well educated ladies, used to have homes owned outright, but now have bugger all. (gave it to the church as i understand it). their attitude seems to be god will provide. Where as the non believer bros/sisters all hold down jobs and work hard to pay their mortgages. It seems to me that the religious pair have handed over all responsibility for themselves to god, and are thus poor, while the others seem to rely on themselves rather than a higher power. There seems to be a pattern with resigning oneself to gods will, rather than saying "if i want my lot to improve, i need to do it for myself"
Speaking of the many ways that institutional religion can go bad, just thought I'd throw this into the conversation for those who might be interested and/or have an open mind. I think Fr. Barron speaks very effectively on the issue.
