History has always been filled with extremists, but the point is what you're extreme about - Ghandi was an extremist, for peace and if all religions had extremists in the same percent - well, I'd love to live in a world of radical extremist Tibetan Buddhists, or Shinto priests. Those bastards would be perusing extremist acts like planting huge gardens in office buildings (how dare then on private property) and casting large sand mandalas in public places, while Shinto priests hand paper flowers in malls in defiance to posted ordinances prohibiting this sort of thing. How dare they.

But, somewhere along the way, religion and mysticism changed from worshiping the rocks and trees, to worshiping animals, to worshiping animal spirits, to worshiping spirits, to worshiping one spirit and now were stuck with assholes that carry everything from guns to nukes and do things because that's what they think this spirit wants.

By far the vast majority of problems of violence today are caused by the fallout of a 5000 year old blood feud and who knows why that really started, but it's been exported from the middle east to Europa and the Americas in the 21st century and 911 is a direct result of the Arab Israeli conflict, they, together, are at large to blame for this. More so for not putting an end to a 5000 year old war, that's just bullshit.

And the problem seems to be that somewhere along the way religion changed from something that worships flowers to something that worships the spirits in the flowers all the way up to the latest fad in mythology the Abrahamic monotheistic god, who is frankly an utter dick. He smites, he kills and maims, he wipes out who scores and races of people. What the fuck is up with that? Mars the god of war won out, apparently exterminating the likes of Aphrodite and Venus. Such epic failure.

So the problem isn't Arabs or Israelis or Jews or Africans or Eastern Europrans or Western Europeans, the problem is the mass delusion of a belief in a spirit that drives foreign policy - with tanks and fighter jets and in the US case, nukes.

Bush, Harper and Blair all have a documented deep seated belief they're doing their gods work in liberating the middle east from Muslim control and this is just a modern day version of the crusades. When you add this to the 5000 year old middle east blood feud how could the world end up any other way?

I suspect future historians will have a field day with this, pointing out that a majority of the population of the planet, and certainly the ones in seats of power, believe in a supernatural spirit and those that don't, but instead adhere to principles of reason, natural laws and logic are looked down upon as idiots of imbeciles. I suspect when the final book on history is written this time will be looked on as the most dangerous time in the entire history of and against human intelligence. I'm utterly certain at some point religion will go away as an archaic fairy tale, but until then it turns men into animals and distracts us from our real enemies -- poverty, disease and ignorance.