Can you comment, please on:

(1) the parallels between terrorism, genocide, and femicide? Both of these target individuals or groups of individuals on the basis of the us/them dichotomy.

AND

(2) on what basis a secular understanding can save lives if it has the same us/them mentality about faiths that the “faiths” do about each other?

The real dichotomy is between faith and practice, whether of theology or law.

I say this as degreed in music and theology, both of which entail “practice.”

I hope to be around for that discussion, and to read your book, but am struggling with how to safely finish divorcing a man that battered me in the name of his god and male-ness; and currently he has my kids.

Violence shatters all reason. It should not cost a woman her life or her children (or her livelihood) in the process of leaving a man in order to save her life and her children. But it does.

This is sanitized and rationalized in courts of law with as much messianic self-righteousness as in the churches that won’t address it either, and it’s spiritually and emotionally sickening.

So I ask, who is looking at the PROFIT motive as well as the basic human instincts of lust for power, and greed. You’ve mentioned the psychological and theological views of society. How about simple profit/loss? (The pelican brief, anyone?) WHo profits from others’ dysfunctions whereas it ought to be, mutual proftits from exchanges of goods?

Behind closed doors is where these things happen. I’m talking in courts, schools, churches, mosques, and families.

I hope to be around for the discussion, but right now am struggling still with the same issues – the fallout from domestic violence, my sense of multiple betrayals, and working to utilize the core of my faith to continue to work virtual miracles, while trying to adjust my loss of “faith” in the legal systems that should’ve stood firm (and been enforced fairly) where it wasn’t. In looking closer at this, it takes personal morality to not look the other way, or even not to lie in court.

THe enforcement of the laws that are to protect having failed, I am brought again (and enriched) back to basic faith in a god that hears, knows, and sees when others do not. And in the analogy (for those who do not believe it literally) of a christ who took the rap for speaking truth, and for hugging lepers, noticing women, and pointing out that he that is without sin, let him cast the first stone. APpropriately, it seems, the woman (not two people) caught in adultery was about to be stoned.

There’s a wisdom in that, it seems to me. I could at least attempt to follow in the footsteps of such a leader.

You just heard from a woman who hasn’t seen one child in a year and a half, can’t practice her former profession for the trauma of how this happened, And is unsure whether the next round (of my attempt at justice) is going to get someone hurt, or herself homeless. And had better believe in a resurrection if she’s going to go a few more rounds of this.

If “we” are going to continue as an imperialistic nation (and it seems to be the course), “we” are going to need an educational system and a culture that will erode self-sufficiency, maturity, basic compassion, and the ability to reason. Case in point, it’s here.

(Lord have mercy…)