Every year I tell my Boston University undergraduates that there are two worthy pursuits for college students. One is preprofessional: preparing for a career that will put food on the table and a roof overhead. The other is more personal: finding big questions worth asking, which is to say, questions that cannot be answered in one lecture, one semester, or even a lifetime. What is my purpose in life? What will happen to me when I die? How do things come into being? How do they cease to be?
Students bring into college classrooms big questions of that sort. Just as predictably, many professors try to steer them toward smaller questions, which can be asked and answered on a final exam. But the students have it right: In this case, bigger is better.
When I was younger, I thought I had the answers to the big questions. I now know I didn't even have the questions right. If, as Muhammad once said, "Asking good questions is half of learning," I was at best a half-wit. Today I try to follow the advice of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke to "love the questions themselves," not least those from the American mystic Walt Whitman:
What saw you to tell us?
What stays with you latest and deepest? Of curious panics,
Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?
There are all sorts of reasons to wrestle with the big questions of the world's religions. One is civic. It is impossible today to make sense of either nation or world without reckoning with the extraordinary influence, for good and ill, of religious ideas and institutions. But there are also personal reasons for cultivating religious literacy, including the fact that such learning empowers you to enter into a wonderful multimillennial conversation about birth and death, faith and doubt, meaning and confusion.
The philosopher Richard Rorty has called religion a conversation stopper, and who hasn't had a conversation run aground on the rocks of dogma? For many of my students, however, religion serves as a conversation starter. We human beings ask questions. We want to know why. Our happiness depends upon it (and, of course, our misery). To explore the great religions is to stand alongside Jesus and the Buddha, Moses and Muhammad, and to look out at a whole universe of questions with curiosity and awe. It is to meander, as all good conversations do, from topic to topic, question to question. Does God exist? Does evil? Do we? Why are we here? Where are we going? How are we to live?
When people ask me how I became a professor of religious studies, I usually say that I discovered the study of religion just as I was losing the Christian faith of my youth, and that the discipline gave me a way to hang in with religious questions (which continued to fascinate me) without any presumption that the answers were close at hand. When, to paraphrase St. Augustine, I became "a question to myself," even bigger questions called out to me, and my conversation with the great religions began.
One of the most common misconceptions about those religions is that they plumb the same depths and ask the same questions. They do not. Only religions that see God as all good ask how a good God can allow thousands to die in earthquakes and tsunamis. Only religions that believe in souls ask whether your soul exists before you are born and what happens to it after you die. And only religions that think we have one soul ask after "the soul" in the singular.
Every religion, however, asks after the human condition. Each seeks to answer the sorts of questions that lie at the heart of the humanities. Here we are in human bodies. What now? What next? How to become a human being?
It is easy to imagine that the task of the great religions is not to make us human but to make us something else. This world is not our true home; being human is not our true calling. So it is religion's job to transport us to heaven or nirvana or moksha; Christianity will transfigure us into saints, Buddhism into bodhisattvas, Hinduism into gods.
But the metamorphosis offered by the great religions is often less dramatic than spinning golden gods out of human straw. Even in traditions of escape from the sin and suffering of this world, religion works not so much to help us flee from our humanity as to bring us home to it. "The glory of God," wrote the second-century Roman Catholic bishop, Irenaeus of Lyons, "is a human being fully alive." Or, as the modern Confucian scholar Tu Weiming puts it, "We need not depart from our selfhood and our humanity to become fully realized."
Of course, we are born human beings, but only in the most trivial sense. Often our humanity lies ahead of us—an achievement rather than an inheritance, and a far-from-trivial achievement at that. Yes, Christianity tells us we are sinners and calls us to be something else. But Christians have not typically affirmed that Jesus took on a human body only to save us from our sins. Among the purposes of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is to show us how to inhabit a human body, and to demonstrate that being human, too, is sacred. Other religions can also be understood in this light. In Islam the fact that Muhammad is emphatically not divine does not prevent him from serving as the model for humanity par excellence. In Taoism, the sages show us how to act as we really are, which is natural, spontaneous, and free.
One of the greatest stories ever told is also one of the oldest: the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Gilgamesh is a god/man, king of Uruk, a city dweller and guardian of civilization. Enkidu is an animal/man, dressed in animal skins, a forest dweller and threat to civilization who runs with wild beasts. The story of these two men—a sort of On the Road for the third millennium BC—gets going when, during their initial encounter, they wrestle to a draw and become fast friends. Soon they are casting themselves into the sorts of adventures that virile young men have forever imagined, tales that only forests and monsters can bring. And when one of those monsters comes bearing death, Gilgamesh goes on a quest for immortality.
Like any classic, the Epic of Gilgamesh is many tales tucked into one, but among other things it is a meditation on how to become a human being. As the story opens, Gilgamesh the god/man thinks himself superior to other humans, while Enkidu the animal/man thinks himself inferior. As the story progresses, each becomes a human being. Enkidu seems to become human by having sex with a woman, who then washes and shaves his hairy body, while Gilgamesh seems to become human by watching his friend die and grieving his passing. Eros and Thanatos, as Freud might say: the sex urge and the death urge, two sides of being human.
A few years ago, when "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelets were colonizing evangelical wrists across America, a friend of mine started making "What Would You Do?" bracelets. Forget what Jesus would do. What would Joseph or Katie do? Inside the packing boxes for the bracelets, my friend tucked sayings from various thinkers about finding and following your own path. Almost all religions intimate that what God or Heaven wants for us is simply to become ourselves: The 18th-century Hasidic rabbi Zusya believed that when he reached the next world, God would not ask him, "Why were you not Moses?" but "Why were you not Zusya?" Kristofer Marinus Schipper wrote in The Taoist Body, "'The Tao has ten thousand gates,' say the masters, and it is up to each of us to find our own."
To explore the great religions is to wander through those gates. It is to enter into Hindu conversations on the logic of karma and rebirth, Christian conversations on the mechanics of sin and resurrection, and Taoist conversations on flourishing here and now (and perhaps forever). It is also to encounter rivalries between Hindus and Muslims in India, between Jews and Muslims in Israel, and between Christians and Yoruba practitioners in Nigeria.
Each of those religious rivals offers a different vision of "a human being fully alive." Each offers its own distinctive diagnosis of the human problem and its own prescription for a cure. Each offers its own techniques for reaching its religious goal, and its own exemplars for emulation. Muslims say pride is the problem; Christians say salvation is the solution; Confucians emphasize education and ritual; Buddhism's exemplars are the arhat (for Theravadins), the bodhisattva (for Mahayanists), and the lama (for Tibetan Buddhists).
I do not believe that Islam and Christianity are fated for battle in a "clash of civilizations." But it is fantasy to pretend that they are in essence the same, or that their disagreements with Judaism are trivial. God may be one to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, but their G-d, their Christ, and their Allah make very different demands on their followers.
It is of course possible to overemphasize these differences, and the great religions do converge at points. Some of the questions they ask overlap, as do some of the answers. And all their adherents are human beings with human bodies and human failings, so each of the great religions needs to attend to our embodiment and to the human predicament, not least by defining what it is to be fully alive.
But religious folk go about this task in very different ways. Confucians believe that we become fully human by entwining ourselves in intricate networks of social relations. Taoists believe we become fully human by disentangling ourselves from social relations. Muhammad's three core human qualities, according to the Islam scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, are piety, combativeness, and magnanimity. The Buddha may have been magnanimous, but he was far from pious. In fact, he didn't even believe in God. And Jesus may have been magnanimous, too, but when combat called, he turned the other cheek. If the Tao has ten thousand gates, so do the great religions.
In The World's Religions, the best-selling course book in the history of religious studies (at 2.5 million sold), Huston Smith speaks of the great religions as different paths up the same mountain. "It is possible to climb life's mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge," he writes. "At base, in the foothills of theology, ritual, and organizational structure, the religions are distinct. ... But beyond these differences, the same goal beckons." Today's so-called new atheists also look beyond religious differences. For Christopher Hitchens and friends, however, the great religions share not the same truth and beauty but the same idiocy and ugliness. What the new atheists and the old liberal universalists share is a refusal to wrestle with religious diversity. Rather than ten thousand gates, they see only one.
Such thinking is ideological rather than analytical. In the case of the new atheists, it starts with the desire to denounce the worst in religion. In the case of the perennialists, it starts with the desire to praise the best in religion. Neither of those desires serves our understanding of a world in which religious traditions are at least as diverse as political, economic, and social arrangements. It does not serve diplomats or entrepreneurs working in India or China to be told that Hindus and Confucians are equally idiotic. It does not serve soldiers in the Middle East to be told that the Shia Islam of Iran is essentially the same as the Sunni Islam of Saudi Arabia, or that Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Israel do not disagree fundamentally on matters of faith or practice.
At the dawn of the 20th century, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. DuBois prophesied that "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line." In the wake of September 11, Eboo Patel, of the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core, suggested that religion is the problem of the 21st century. Whether we are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, or nonbelievers, we need to reckon with our religion problem, not least by listening to the big questions that adherents are asking.
When Americans began to wrestle with the challenges of race and ethnicity, many suggested that the only way forward was to create a colorblind society, in which all human beings are one. Today it is widely recognized that a firmer foundation for interracial and interethnic civility is a robust understanding of, and respect for, racial and ethnic differences. The realm of religion requires no less understanding of diversity, and no less respect.
Comments
1. generally_academic - June 28, 2010 at 12:55 am
Of course, one can also become a Literature scholar and ask the same questions, and from that come up with a multitude of good answers as well. There is no reason to suggest that we confine these questions, and answers, to just religion. It falsifies our actual experience of the world, and the Sacred.
Was Walt Whitman (quoted here most appropriately) presenting a religion, or a visionary and mystical attitude best expressed in poetry? And so, what were/are the deeper sources of these questions, below religion and poetry? Perhaps old Walt both had and was the answer.
2. mbelvadi - June 28, 2010 at 10:16 am
I really hope you don't just teach your mostly-Christian undergrads that (all) Hindus think they become "gods". That extreme oversimplification of a nuanced metaphysics is precisely the kind of western rhetoric that leads Christians into thinking that Hindus are as "primitive" as the ancient Greeks with their pantheon of jealous, egotistic personalities. In fact, there is no such thing as "what do Hindus think" about the end of the "soul's" journey - different veins of Hinduism have very different answers, with at least one major one resembling the answer you hear from atheists more than it resembles that of any other world religion.
If you do in fact understand and teach these subtleties, then it's unfortunate that in this article you chose to reduce Hindu beliefs to the most mockable variant of them, again perpetuating the demeaning stereotypes for your primarily western audience.
3. bewb80 - June 28, 2010 at 11:31 am
mbelvadi,
You bring up an excellent point about studying religions in general. There are many intracacies in religions and the understanding of these intracacies is vital to the understanding of the religion. From the article it seems clear that the author believes that glossing over religious beliefs is possible because all religions are mythic and fictitious. How is that respecting a religion or the diversity of all religious beliefs? Not only is the superior view of an academic who has "grown out of" or is above his "childhood faith" condescending but he has, according to your post, misconstrued Hinduism and, in my opinion, falsly identified a central tenent of Christianity. To say that one of the purposes of Christ's incarnation was to teach us how to behave in our bodies and to show us that we are sacred (which in and of itself questions his understanding of Christianity) and then to put that above the atoning role of the incarnation which is what most Christians would argue is the main and sole purpose of incarnation is ludicrous. If he has so misconstrued Hinduism and Christianity in this article, I shudder to think what he has done to the other religions in his book.
It is important to understand religions because for most people, whether they realize it or not, their religion or the religion of their culture shapes their worldview. However, what the author needs to understand is that for followers of a religion, that faith is very real and very important and cannot be glossed over or minimized by skewing central tenents of the faith to find a happy common ground while utterly dismissing other vital tenents that just don't happen to mesh well in his happy little world.
4. generally_academic - June 28, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Whitman's bardic impulse outside the Christian religious dispensation, and Rumi's bardic impulse within the Islamic religious dispensation, for two examples, point to a deeper level of energy, one that has its fountainhead below the conventional pieties or proclivities of either religion. I suspect we should look at Shamanic discourse to get closer to the roots of religious and literary visionary experience that gives rise to the fine arts at their best, and religion at its best. The Shamanic world encompasses many of the motives addressed in the article, and it strikes me that the (valid) distinctions and differences noted in religions are parallel to the differences and distinctions we find in the literature of various people. As they say in Theatre, to fully understand your subject, "go deeper."
5. lisaemily - June 28, 2010 at 01:38 pm
As an undergrad I had studied comparative religion. Then I became an atheist. However, I still retain my interested in the various religions as I am still interested in the arts, music, foods, etc. of the world's various peoples. Understanding a culture's religion helps one understand a culture's passions, values, beliefs, and how that culture constructs its reality. I agree that the new atheists do a disservice to their cause by dismissing all religions. Perhaps a better approach is to try to understand what needs the religion serves. To dismiss religion is to cut-off a dialogue; religions will always exist as long as people have imagination.
6. jffoster - June 28, 2010 at 02:00 pm
Generally_academic (4),
isn't "___(name of religion)___ dispensation" a term peculiar to certain Protestant branches of Christianity, as are things like "free will offering", "love the Lord", or "born again"....?
I'm not objecting to it, but unless you want only the "In Group" to understand, you might want to either tell us what it means or use a more general term.
As for 'the Shaman', there is a great deal of ethnographic descriptive and analytic anthropological work on that -- ranging from Jochelson, Shirokogoroff, all the way to a very good contemporary work by Alice B Kehoe. Im sorry I can't remember the title but if you want to understand what shaman (not, BTW "*shamen*) really are and the kinds of societies that have them a prominent regligious functionaries, start with Alice Kehoe's book and work backwards.
7. darkroomjames - June 29, 2010 at 12:04 am
Darkroomjames 11:34pm June 28, 2010
I sympathize with the loss of one's Christian faith upon a wider education. I sought first the kingdom of God in my youth, but then practiced Carl Sagan's motto: "follow the truth, where ever it leads." Discovering his PBS "Cosmos" series was a pleasant experience, confirming many thoughts I had over the years. Joseph Campbell's "Power of Myth" series further opened my mind.
So I have finally come to the conclusion that God is a perception, a place in the heart and mind of retrospection, introspection, and varieties of experiences.
The God of DNA gave us all religions and unbeliefs for various reasons. The God of DNA reigns on earth, but possibly no where else... The God of the Periodic Table rules the universe. Eventually the human genome will be fully explored, and the mind/brain subjectively explored following the objective explorations indicating needs for study, including such things as nirvana and other gratifying God experiences.
The supernatural religions explored the psyche/phenomenology of human being across cultures, peoples, and different times. Verification and development of factual knowledges about the objective universe is a different, scientific undertaking. But constructing the universal features of God via the subjective was first attempted by an Indian ruler centuries ago as Hindu and Moslem holy men tried to describe the potent being of God within. Brain physiology traces its genetics back to a common ancestor in Africa millenia before, so it would be surprising that God experiences wouldn't have commonalities.
Exploring the encyclopedia of the subjective nature of the mind/brain human genome in coming centuries will confirm and define the nature of God within.
There is a God, because we have souls, we love, and we celebrate life. We believe in justice although life is unjust. Justice is a frame of mind we mustn't lose. We aren't just animals, but some of us lose the ability to care in some childhood or adult crisis. Becoming a barbarian is always a danger to modern humanity. Through the arts we attempt to celebrate a common sense of wealth of civilizations in the global village. Of course civilization occurs no where else than in the fragile thread of subjective being in each of us who feel compassion and who serve justice. It is a fleeting moment of mortal human being in unity with all others who feel the same way.
8. jffoster - June 29, 2010 at 09:27 am
Darkroomjames, et al.
You might want to include in your reading Guy Swanson's "The Birth of the Gods: the Origins of Primitive Beliefs".
As a comment general, it may or may not ultimately be possible to explain religious belief or the lack of it in reference to genetics and the central nervous system. It will not be possible to explain patternws in variation and differences in religious belief except in reference to Culture -- not the "culture" of Raymond Williams and the "cultural studies" crowd but the sociocultural systems that Anthropology studies.
9. mart7624 - June 29, 2010 at 12:33 pm
It's silly to include islam as religion on the level of other global faiths. islam is in reality a death cult sworn to the detruction of western civilization and the reduction of non-muslims to dhimmitude if not extinction.
10. williame - June 29, 2010 at 01:16 pm
It is true that we all, for the most part, are in search of our purpose and have asked, "Why are we here?" But to connect our quest for our identify with that of our curosity with the existence of God, evil, etc. is a stretch.
You present two issues which can be viewed as independent of each other. Thus, you spark my curosity about your true underlying motive or reason for writing this article. If it is your desire to attack the various religions, then do so directly.
11. generally_academic - June 29, 2010 at 05:33 pm
#6 and all: I'm quite conversant with the literature of Shamanism, and don't need to read every book of special pleading for their one, true, and only accurate definition. Like many terms, and like the view of religions Prothero discusses, there are sufficient variables that we cannot get anal-retentive about any one. To avoid further confusion, I'll use a proper term for my perspective, and call it the Bardic Visions.
To understand what the Bardic Vision implies, you will need to read some books. Here is a very foreshortened starter set:
Rumi, J.a.M.: Matnawiye, complete (various spellings in English)
Cross, St. John of the: Complete Poems
Blake, William: Songs of Innocence; Songs of Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass (Deathbed edition, complete)
Crane, Hart: The Bridge.
I would give this tradition, the visionary/mystical tradition *of literature* (called the Bardic tradition here) equivalency to the religious tradition, for the purposes of discussing my critique of Prothero's thesis.
When you've read all these, get back to me for some more. In a few years, you could have a good initial understanding of this valuable area of study.
12. jffoster - June 29, 2010 at 09:33 pm
Well, well. In reference to No 11, one can be "quite familiar" with the literature on the Wind, and give the "Bardic Tradition" (poetic and visionary, I guess) "quivalency with" the religious tradition about the Wind.
Hosever, if one wants to understand the WIND, what it is and what causes it, one might want to consider the physics and meteorological traditions.
It seems that C P Snow is still right.
13. darkroomjames - June 30, 2010 at 12:32 am
Beano aside, CP Snow's "Two Cultures Now" is the cultural bandaid for noting the cerebrum trotting off in one direction of industrial technology and inquiry, and the cerebellum sticking to the traditional paths of glory of our forefathers. Being smacked upside the head by multiple generation gaps and an explosion of technological (serious or trivial) pursuits putsus all into new territories of lost concensus realities, Uncle Sam is not the coherent national character he seemed at one time. Virginia O'Hanlon's letter to the editor still helps a bit, but we're losing the thread!
14. bobshelby - June 30, 2010 at 03:19 am
The trouble with religion, categorically, is that members of a significantly large portion of each religion's following are faking it in order to lead others and assure "righteous molding of children" to further assure those members' own, continuing livelihood and social power. I have seen expressions on the faces of young ministers which look indistinguishable from those of needy and eager, used-car salesmen, insurance agents or "ambulance-chasing" lawyers. These are more to be commiserated with than mocked, but similarities are better recognized than left unnoticed. How human! But this does not exemplify that fullness of humanity which Mr. Prothero would claim as the goal of religion.
We cannot have useful discussion of religion without corresponding interest in spirituality. We can place #11's Bardic Tradition in the frame of spirituality without subsuming or totally preempting the frame, and without getting misty about visionary mysticism. Spirituality need not be visionary or mystical. It is a way of being directed toward wholeness, truth and benevolence, including a will to improve oneself and everything around which one reasonably can with the means one has. Hence, religion owes more to spirituality (or holistic humanness) than spirituality owes to religion, though the relation can be bidirectional. Religiosity can twist a Golden Rule into an Inquisition, but spirituality cannot easily lose itself in doctrinal logistics like a Torquemada.
15. educationnet2007 - June 30, 2010 at 07:23 am
You forgot to add one question to your big ones--"what is your favorite color?" lol
16. jffoster - June 30, 2010 at 07:32 am
Bobshelby (14),
What religion is I have a pretty good idea of, at least the common core if not the fuzzier edges. And I taught our course called "Religion in Culture" for many years.
But what "spirituality" is I have no idea. So pretend I am Pontius your Pilot.
"What is 'Spirituality'?"
17. hildavcarpenter - June 30, 2010 at 09:17 am
I for one enjoyed your guiding light for these children of Israel out of the desert to investigate their own thoughts about Their spirituality. After all isn't that what philosophy is about? Thank you. I enjoyed your article. You had me at Richard Rorty.
18. panacea - June 30, 2010 at 10:34 am
Re #14: My impression is, for the author, religion and spirituality are the same.
Religion can be a useful cloak and tool for the irreligious to weild influence or power over others. But the author speaks to the fundamental purposes of religion, through the eyes of a person of faith.
The author aknowledges that an atheist would view his thoughts with cynicism.
19. darkroomjames - June 30, 2010 at 12:36 pm
I don't see Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious as too far-fetched in noting the repetition of archetypal symbols among many religions. Based on the agrarian economies of pre-scientific times, such symbols no longer hold the attention of the non-farming metropolitan peoples of today. And yes, there is some bad play-acting coming from clergy that are trying to keep the Biblical world view in place like some poorly-constructed fig leaf. But what is the honorable alternative?
Imagine where civilization will go without being able to build a religious knowledge system upon the demise of the crumbling supernatural world. Imagine the Holy Bible being desperately defended by mad lawmakers who would return to making it the law of the land not unlike a neurotic Christian Taliban, where an entirely bizarre, national schizophrenia would band together to make Christianity the nasty band-aid for the very kind of cover-up corruption it would spawn. The ironic Christ on the Cross morphs over from the iconic. Spiritual tin ears guiding the nation's official mentoring is the evil here.
I tried to read one of Reverend Schuller's books recently,and he talks down to an alarmingly less than academic audience, to say the least. The level of national sophistication is in grave jeopardy in their hands. And Reverend Schuller is one of the tolerant good guys. Try watching James Kennedy or some other dead-end anti-intellectual, anti-spiritual clergy member.
I dared write this little thing on the God of the Periodic Table and the God of DNA to convey my awareness of and love for the scientific world view as it accurately describes the medical realities of our flesh and blood, to the recognition of the human mind's tendency to create divinity throughout history where the perception of God's power is at work defining the world. I knew that someone of this readership would take offense at anthropomorphizing the universe; but this is what the human race has done for millions of years. Do you honestly think it will stop here with this generation? :o)
When I say God bless us all, I mean good intentions, good interpretations of responses, and forgiveness of mistaken interpretations or notions of my intentions. I mean no harm, and hope to further the possibility of evolving more of future civilization, if not a better future church, not that I have any serious ambitions. I only meant to speak my mind. Mission, um, accomplished. What could possibly go wrong, ha, ha?
20. philosophy - June 30, 2010 at 06:52 pm
You are too dismissive of the new atheists. They are a varied lot, and Hitchens is only one of them. Eg. Sam Harris has a high regard for Buddhism, and Richard Dawkins calls himself a "cultural Christian" who is only 6/7 sure that there's no god.
What they do seem to share is an insistence, for any religious claim, that the religious should respond to the questions, "Is it actually true? How do you know? Why should I believe as you do?" And for the most part, the religous avoid serious and detailed responses to such questions.
21. darkroomjames - June 30, 2010 at 10:49 pm
It is not I who is too dismissive of the new atheists, but rather the movers and shakers of the general public whose inertia determines the fate of the American nation that once saw an immense industrial vista powering the engine of world industry, from inventions and culture to military innovations and diplomatic/economic world rescue. The generations of honest scholarly achievement and sophisticated mentoring of the world have suddenly evaporated in two generations since WWII with the future shocks that precipitated the multiple generation gaps and killed God dead. Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved the Periodic Table, not just in the minds of the public, but in the minds of lergy whose entire take on God became pipe dreams as the atomic age and moon landings took away the tangible nature of God. The roar of 1978's Moral Majority was a scream of primal horror and fear of the future that no longer included Republican Christians. Degenerate responses ever since have shown the dwindling of the right-wing intellect of the once most educated nation on earth, reduced to anti-intellectualism in the name of their insincere "God" re-interpreted to suit their grabby dirty-tricks politics. "In Gotcha we trust" frames the Rovian desert dwellers of the Washington Beltway, damning all of America to war with any peoples of the earth still fortunate enough to have an honest God to turn to. The Pentagon, Inc. runs on jealousy and profit. We can't even export democracy when Bush "acquired" the presidency under clandestine clouds of doubt.
Until the Democrats, Republicans, Christians, and other American factions can get along without anyone flaming or ranting at anyone else, America is like a crash-diving submarine heading for crush depth. By 2050, the Chinese will probably know how to pick up the pieces, if not Canada. It all depends on who will own America's debt...
22. lksilva - July 01, 2010 at 04:52 pm
You will encounter rivalries between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria and not between Christians and Yoruba practitioners. Yoruba is a tribe in Southern part of Nigeria and is not a religion.
Mokenji.
23. sherlette - July 03, 2010 at 02:08 pm
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