"[T]he most effective way for European Union governments to deal with their Muslim minorities is to empower the Muslim women living within their borders. The best tool for empowering these women is education. Yet the education systems of some European Union countries are going through a crisis of neglect, particularly with regard to immigrant children. We are paying the price of mixing education with ideology. However, let me stick to the important subject of freeing women from the shackles of superstitious belief and tribal custom. The biggest obstacle that hinders Muslim women from leading dignified, free lives is violence--physical, mental, and sexual--committed by their close families. Here is only a sample of some of the violence perpetrated on girls and women from Islamic cultures:

Four-year-old girls have their genitals mutilated: some of them so badly that they die of infections; others are traumatised for life from the experience and will later suffer recurrent infections of their reproductive and urinary systems.

Teenage girls are removed from school by force and kept inside the house to stop their schooling, stifle their thinking and suffocate their will.

Victims of incest and sexual abuse are beaten, deported or killed to prevent them from filing complaints.

Some pregnant victims of incest or abuse are forced by their fathers, older brothers, or uncles to have abortions in order to keep the family honour from being stained. In this era of DNA testing, the girls could demonstrate that they have been abused. Yet instead of punishing the abusers, the family treats the daughter as if she had dishonoured the family.

Girls and women who protest their maltreatment are beaten by their parents in order to kill their spirits and reduce them to a lifelong servitude that amounts to slavery.

Many girls and women who can't bear to suffer any more take their own lives or develop numerous kinds of psychological ailments, including nervous breakdown and psychosis. They are literally driven mad.

A Muslim girl in Europe runs more risk than girls of other faiths of being forced into marriage by her parents with a stranger. In such a marriage -- which, since it is forced, by definition starts with rape -- she conceives child after child. She is an enslaved womb. Many of her children will grow up in a household with parents who are neither bound by love nor interested in the wellbeing of their children. The daughters will go through life as subjugated as their mothers and the sons become -- in Europe -- dropouts from school, attracted to pastimes that can vary from loitering in the streets to drug abuse to radical Islamic fundamentalism.

European policy-makers have not yet understood the huge potential of liberating Muslim women. They are squandering the single best opportunity they have to make Muslim integration a success within one generation. Morally, governments need to eradicate violence against women in Europe. This would make clear to fundamentalists that Europeans take their constitutions seriously. Now, most abusers simply think that Western rhetoric about the equality of men and women is cowardly and hypocritical, since Western governments tolerate the abuse of millions of Muslim women when they're told it's in the name of freedom of religion."

Why we went into Iraq is largely forgotten: (1) to eliminate once-and-for-all the potential danger of Iraq's WMDs; (2) to eliminate a state-sponsor-and practitioner-of international terrorism; and (3) to eliminate one of the most savage and brutal regimes of modern times.

CJ,

I have several criticisms of what you wrote here. I do appreciate the passion at which you attack your thesis. Let me start in. You write:

...our modern Western world is essentially predicated on the notion that consciousness, interiority is a lie.

Don't you think this is a statement impossible to qualify or support? I would rather think it more true that it is your entry here that is predicated on that statement being true. If it is false, where does that leave your thesis, or Wilber's?

Later on:

Wilber's genius, among others, was to add the notion that this interiority is always enmeshed in language...

And poets haven't demonstrated this since the beginning of recorded poetry? And if "language" is taken broadly, that all of the works of the great artists? And, for christ's sake, a mother who gives her child the "evil eye"? And the rituals, which are the substratum beneath all human religion, haven't demonstrated this as far back as we can tell? Come on, now. This is mere skimming the cream off the gallon of milk and calling it the cow.

Let me add that there has, for several books, been an implication forwarded by Wilber that it is some big insight that there is perception beyond language. This is true, but elementary -- as usual, he blows it out of proportion. What person who has learned a second, third, or fourth language isn't aware of the self-evident truth that there are limits to language, and the there is awareness beyond those limits? It's called wanting to be able to say something, but not being able to, or stuttering. Or, looking into someone's eyes. Again, come on.

Here's some more:

If you do not accept this point, and I have yet to see an argument (and I've read plenty) that shows that this method does not arrive at a coherent description of the facts, then there is no integral.

Leaving aside your argument from authority, let me get this straight -- you expect some argument for a philosophical system to arrive at a coherant description of the facts which leaves aside most questions, thorns, perspectives, energies, materials save for the one you seem to really dig (i.e., Teilhard's "path") -- which (again, leaving EVERYTHING ELSE aside, by "bracketing") will describe the history of the universe? That history of the universe being events as they arise, in time, through history? The history of consciousness as it is claimed to have evolved?

And this is not a fantastically narrow demand, how?

And are you implying that we should trust any account of the so-called history of the universe as a bonefide "description of the facts" that leaves most of reality aside? Why should I? How can we understand Apollo if we don't understand Dionysus?

If that is what integral is, then, no, it doesn't exist in any meaningful way, because its narrowness disallows any real bearing on life. But as I have argued elsewhere, I don't think that is what integral is. It is what Wilberian thought it, but not integral.

You continue:

I'm talking about a specific intellectual methodology that claims to gives a perspective able to comprehend a deeper purpose/alignment/synthesis to creation.... And show me the actual practice that will disclose to me how incorrect all of this has always and will always be.

Well, it starts by living an engaged life and gets out into the world and talks to people. It continues by growing up. It moves on into more specifically intellectual zones by reading and reconciling the vast accounts of cultural achievement that make up the Humanities (and which should be at the core of any education). It continues by witnessing the birth of a person or other life, or the changing of the seasons, or by the overall cycle of life and death that intimately effects and ruptures us all. It further continues by writing and talking about all this with others, or making something creative such as a piece of art, and refining our skills in doing so along the way.

The actual doing of which renders efforts such as Wilber and other bracketing theorists not necessarily right or wrong (for what, really, is fallible in any of this speculation?) but so self-servingly disproportiate to the journey of actual discovery of life itself that its own narrowness (again, self-defined by this incessant "bracketing") renders it on the verge of meaningless sophistry.

I'm coming to a close. You say:

What methodology does perennialism give for itself? It gives traditional meditation, which as I'm pointing out can not locate, can not see (is not in the right position, does not have the tools) to make a judgment on genealogy. Even one of spirit--in form, both interior and exterior.

Find me the perennialist who advocates meditation and meditation alone.

And lastly:

I'm not talking about gurus, foonotes and bad page numbers cited, bat wings, marketing, personality flaws, experimental discover your altitude/shadow blogs, ab/use of systems, generalizing orientations, writing style.

Ah, more bracketing. Well, I take it that you stipulate to these criticisms, which would at least be some kind of progress towards seeing the light of what Wilber's work actually is.

It seems to me that you attempt to serve the cause of Wilberism. Well, if I might bracket that, allow me to suggest that the cause of integral is best served by embracing, and not attempting to conquer, the Humanities and by inviting others to share in the mysteries evoked from the beginning of self-awareness in humans, in which there is nothing to evolve past, over, under, or around, but rather to be weighed in the process of loving, listening, and relating to other humans and to life itself, which is what God (defined by any cultural norm) actually is; i.e., the force of nature that brings people together in groups, then depersonalized into a "god".

It is not that Wilber is wrong; it is that his work (like that of Foucault) by its own self-defined and narrow nature, is astonishingly elementary to the implications of its conclusions (if he'll ever actually make them). Or, in the words of Dorothy Parker, Wilber's work and all like it run the gamut of emotions from A to B.

So, next we move to C, then D, and, ooh, E, and then ...

harmonic,
md

The truth, however, is that you didn't have "Christianist" politics in 1964 because you didn't have secularist politics in an important way back then. It's fairly clear that liberals, rather than conservatives, were the ones who fired the first shots in the God wars -- the Supreme Court case on prayer in public schools, and the various causes associated with feminism and the sexual revolution. Social conservatism as we understand it didn't exist in the '50s and early '60s because everyone was socially conservative (everyone who mattered politically, that is; there were always libertine-minded intellectuals and so forth) so there was nothing to mobilize around.

Instead, you had culture mobilization primarily around race and race-linked topics. Once liberals put a more robust conception of a secular state on the table and feminists began demanding serious revisions in traditional gender roles, then you saw a meaningful political movement in defense of older ways that, previously, had been conventional wisdom rather than a political cause.

Conservatism aims to overcome ruptures between ancient and modern, and it presumes, as against clever objections, that there is an implicit “logic” in common human practices such as giving thanks to God.

MF: Oil has been a blessing from one point of view, but a curse from another. Almost every country in the Middle East that is rich in oil is a despotism.

LA: : Why do you think that is so?

MF: One reason, and one reason only—the oil is owned by the governments in question. If that oil were privately owned and thus someone's private property, the political outcome would be freedom rather than tyranny. This is why I believe the first step following the 2003 invasion of Iraq should have been the privatization of the oil fields. If the government had given every individual over 21 years of age equal shares in a corporation that had the right and responsibility to make appropriate arrangements with foreign oil companies for the purpose of discovering and developing Iraq's oil reserves, the oil income would have flowed in the form of dividends to the people — the shareholders — rather than into government coffers. This would have provided an income to the whole people of Iraq and thereby prevented the current disputes over oil between the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, because oil income would have been distributed on an individual rather than a group basis.

There are two areas in the United States that suffer from the same disease — education is one and health care is the other. They both suffer from the disease that takes a system that should be bottom-up and converts it into a system that is top-down. Education is a simple case. It isn't the public purpose to build brick schools and have students taught there. The public purpose is to provide education.

Aside from the murder and genocide, what exactly don’t you like about National Socialism?

Our goal should be not only to make sure all levels of government are prepared when disaster strikes, but also to ensure that local governments exhibit the self-sufficiency to deal with disasters without having to turn to the federal government in every instance. The more local governments can do to help themselves, the more local governments can do to prevent disaster, then the better and more effective our response will be.

While Louisiana has relied heavily on our federal government in our recovery efforts thus far, this is not the ultimate answer. Our recovery lies in the hands of individuals visiting our state, businesses locating and reopening in Louisiana, and trade groups once again booking their conventions in New Orleans.

Circumcision started in America during the masturbation hysteria of the Victorian Era, when a few American doctors circumcised boys to punish them for masturbating. Victorian doctors knew very well that circumcision denudes, desensitizes, and disables the penis. Nevertheless, they were soon claiming that circumcision cured epilepsy, convulsions, paralysis, elephantiasis, tuberculosis, eczema, bed-wetting, hip-joint disease, fecal incontinence, rectal prolapse, wet dreams, hernia, headaches, nervousness, hysteria, poor eyesight, idiocy, mental retardation, and insanity.

In fact, no procedure in the history of medicine has been claimed to cure and prevent more diseases than circumcision. As late as the 1970s, leading American medical textbooks still advocated routine circumcision as a way to prevent masturbation. The antisexual motivations behind an operation that entails cutting off part of the penis are obvious.

The radical practice of routinely circumcising babies did not begin until the Cold War era. This institutionalization of what amounted to compulsory circumcision was part of the same movement that pathologized and medicalized birth and actively discouraged breastfeeding. Private-sector, corporate-run hospitals institutionalized routine circumcision without ever consulting the American people. There was no public debate or referendum. It was only in the 1970s that a series of lawsuits forced hospitals to obtain parental consent to perform this contraindicated but highly profitable surgery. Circumcisers responded by inventing new "medical" reasons for circumcision in an attempt to scare parents into consenting.

This is a very healthy culture as long as we keep up the rigorous training. The kids' true culture is pop culture - they already live in that - so that's why I oppose all this use of TV in school. I want education movie-based, in the way that we had in college. From the moment I arrived in college in 1964 we were immersed in films. I saw something like 800 films. The true multiculturism is foreign films, foreign films with subtitles, so you hear the language. That's the way to teach sex, the way to talk about male/female sex roles: movies. The way to teach what Lacan or Foucault claim to be doing - the relativity of a memory - is "Last Year in Marienbad." Did they meet at Marienbad or not? The inflections of emotion on people's faces, interrelations of subtleties, of non verbal subtleties of interpersonal sexual relations, are shown by cinema. Date-rape feminists want to insist, "No always means no." You'd never believe that if you were seeing cinema.

BEIJING -- A woman in Hohhot, the capital of north China's Inner Mongolia region, crashed her car while giving her dog a driving lesson, the official Xinhua News Agency said Monday.

No injuries were reported although both vehicles were slightly damaged, it said.

The woman, identified only be her surname, Li, said her dog "was fond of crouching on the steering wheel and often watched her drive," according to Xinhua.

"She thought she would let the dog 'have a try' while she operated the accelerator and brake," the report said. "They did not make it far before crashing into an oncoming car."

Xinhua did not say what kind of dog or vehicles were involved but Li paid for repairs.

Mr Honeyford, 72, "retired" more than 20 years ago as the headmaster of a school in Bradford. Or, at least, that was when he was vilified by politically correct race "experts", was sent death threats, and condemned as a racist. Eventually, he was forced to resign and never allowed to teach again.

His crime was to publish an article in The Salisbury Review in 1984 doubting whether the children in his school were best served by the connivance of the educational authorities in such practices as the withdrawal of children from school for months at a time in order to go ''home" to Pakistan, on the grounds that such practices were appropriate to the children's native culture. In language that was sometimes maladroit, he drew attention, at a time when it was still impermissible to do so, to the dangers of ghettoes developing in British cities.

Mr Honeyford thought that schools such as his own, the Drummond Middle School, where 95 per cent of the children were of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, were a disaster both for their pupils and for society as a whole. He was a passionate believer in the redemptive power of education, and its ability to integrate people of different backgrounds and weld them into a common society. He then became notorious for, among other things, his insistence that Muslim girls should be educated to the same standard as everyone else.

Last week, 22 years on, he was finally vindicated. The same liberal establishment that had professed outrage at his views quietly accepted that he was, after all, right. Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, made a speech, publicly questioning the multiculturalist orthodoxies that, for so long, have acted almost as a test of virtue among "right-thinking" people. As Miss Kelly told an audience: "There are white Britons who do not feel comfortable with change. They see the shops and restaurants in their town centres changing. They see their neighbourhoods becoming more diverse.

Detached from the benefits of those changes, they begin to believe the stories about ethnic minorities getting special treatment, and to develop a resentment, a sense of grievance. We have moved from a period of uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism, to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is encouraging separateness. These are difficult questions and it is important that we don't shy away from them. In our attempt to avoid imposing a single British identity and culture, have we ended up with some communities living in isolation of each other, with no common bonds between them?"

While denying the Holocaust, [the Iranian president] is openly preparing the next one. Ahmadinejad is behaving exactly like an Islamist Hitler. He is using the same tactics of signaling in advance the act of destruction. That the same thing is happening is one thing, but that the West is reacting in the same way is unacceptable. What is history for?

Regarding your suggested "dallman-esque" parody, I see where you are going with this, but you must admit the analogy faces problems.

It would only work if, after writing a few speculative but largely scholarly books on the value of the Humanities, I abandoned that practice over the next 15 books in favor of one that substitutes scholarship for the stated the premise that readers should treat what I say and the cherry-picked examples I use to support my thesis "as if they were true", and "bracket" everything else away.

Then I would have to create a p.r. strategy that I am the Einstein of the Humanities, find a publisher who is too interested in the sales of my popular books to actually fact-check them, and be in the position whereby I can exploit an emerging mass media technology (the internet) for the purposes of creating the impression that there are hundreds of scholars working with me in a think-tank environment. I would have to organize meetings over several years bringing together hundreds of talented people in various fields, while in truth merely trying to weed out the free-thinkers from those who will willingly bend to my own preferences in terminology, method, and air of importance.

I would then ask the various people I've corresponded with over the years if they would submit to a phone conversation that would be taped, for purposes I would advertise as furthering their careers and exposing them to a new audience, but in practice whom I would merely use as a sounding board for me to repeat the outlines of my model of reality of the humanities, for the nth iteration, as well as reinforce the impression that I'm relevent, beyond that people are reading my books. I would have to start recruiting people to create a university around my work, and have conference call after conference call of gathered scholars who largely remain silent while I go off and whatever tangent I happen to be feeling that day, and submit to questions only to catch my breath.

I would have to convince numerous 20-somethings to move to my city and work for nothing or next to nothing, all for a cause and eventual payoff I'd have to continually pretend are coming, such as million dollar donations from Tony Robbins. I would have to burn through associations with people, juggling personnel constantly so as to give the impression to those gathered that there was some plan. When that become too transparent, I would invent intentions like "we are like a train that's laying down its rails as it speeds 100 mph down them" in order to humor and placate.

To the most inquisitive of my staff, I would have to say things like "truth always gets fucked up because of market forces", and whatever I would have to say to keep them working for pennies, I would. As I started receiving requests to speak to others, I would have to start acknowledging, contra a p.r. marketing that I had used previously as an escape hatch from critics, that in actuality "the kosmos is big enough for me to be both a guru and a pandit". Furthermore, I would have to adopt, bastardize, and then turn into a religion some dead researcher's speculative framework about the humanities, using his students' interpretation of it that employed colors.

I would then have use this color framework to create all sorts of muddled pseudo-clarity based upon strawmen and fictitious dilemmas the purposes of getting people not to study primary sources as a scholar would, but memorize and spit verbatim the various terms and concepts of my own system, which I couch in protective language as "true but partial" itself, but which I myself treat as the entire, comprehensive, non-marginalizing way to understand the humanities. Further I would have to largely ignore the critiques of people who don't want to work with me in an essentially anonymous fasion, and only when a critical mass emerges from my legions of fans, would I then demogogue in artful avoidance of anything of substance from the critics, but rather leverage the distance between me and them by concluding without proof or argument (which has long been my entire method of thought) that they are at a lower altitude than me.

I would have to respond to one of my most long-time and ardent supporters by saying "suck my dick" and then retreat into a "but it was all a joke" strategy of damage control. And then there would have to be something written by some anonymous person to an online critic that parodies all of this, sometimes well, sometimes not. To which several people respond to, including two jokers who have blogs named "Vomiting Confetti" and "The Daily Goose", and subsequently discuss.

Then, maybe, your analogy might work.

harmonic,
md

Milwaukee, not Vegas, America's drunkest city

It will come as no surprise that the residents of a city known as "The Nation's Watering Hole" like to have a beer or two.

But Milwaukee isn't just your average brewing town. It's the hardest-drinking city in America, according to Forbes.com's ranking of America's Drunkest Cities.

To determine the rankings, we started with a list of the largest metropolitan areas in the continental U.S. Thirty-five candidate cities were chosen based on availability of data and geographic diversity.

Each city was ranked in five areas: state laws, number of drinkers, number of heavy drinkers, number of binge drinkers and alcoholism. Each area was assigned a ranking in each category, based on quantitative data, and all five categories were then totaled to produce a final score, which was sorted to produce our rankings.

... more than 70 percent of adult Milwaukeeans reported that they had had at least one alcoholic drink within the past 30 days — the highest percentage on our list. Twenty-two percent of Milwaukee respondents confessed to binge drinking, or having five or more drinks on one occasion — also the highest on our list.

The Madrid and London terror bombings, the failed plot against America-bound British airliners, the murder of Theo van Gogh, a series of violent anti-Semitic incidents in France, the Paris riots, and the Muhammad cartoon affair have all served to wake up at least some Europeans to the problem of unassimilated Muslim immigrants and their children. Unfortunately, many Europeans remain asleep.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) -- Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The new definition of what is - and isn't - a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have labored since Copernicus without one.

Although astronomers applauded after the vote, Jocelyn Bell Burnell - a specialist in neutron stars from Northern Ireland who oversaw the proceedings - urged those who might be "quite disappointed" to look on the bright side.

"It could be argued that we are creating an umbrella called 'planet' under which the dwarf planets exist," she said, drawing laughter by waving a stuffed Pluto of Walt Disney fame beneath a real umbrella.

"Many more Plutos wait to be discovered," added Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The decision by the prestigious international group spells out the basic tests that celestial objects will have to meet before they can be considered for admission to the elite cosmic club.

For now, membership will be restricted to the eight "classical" planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Much-maligned Pluto doesn't make the grade under the new rules for a planet: "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."

Tonight, I'm really feeling annoyed by feminism. (Yes, I know I'm using a blanket term, one that is much-debated, and defined and redefined....!!!) While women can now join the workforce and do just about any job they can think of that they'd like to do, that one victory has also meant, in my humble opinion, the further decline of how society values feminine attributes, skills and knowledge. Don't get me wrong; it was an important battle to win. As a little girl, it was enormously important to me that I heard that I could do anything. Every little girl deserves a chance to do what she wants. What I feel like I never heard was that it was durned hard to do it all at once.

OLYMPIA - Raccoons are cute, until they kill one of your cats.

That is what a west Olympia neighborhood is learning this summer.

Raccoons have killed about 10 cats in a three-block area near the Garfield Nature Trail at Harrison Avenue West and Foote Street Southwest.

Problem wildlife coordinator Sean Carrell of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife called the situation "bizarre, weird."

"I've never heard a report of 10 cats being killed. It's something we're going to have to monitor," he said. He added that they may have to bring in trappers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The problem got so bad that residents Kari Hall and Tamara Keeton even started a Raccoon Watch after having an emotional neighborhood meeting attended by about 40 people.

"It was a place for people to mourn and cry," Hall said.

To pay too much attention to detail and be too rigorous in your research is simply by today's level of evolution a waste of time and money. And we all know that and the evidence for it is simply so pervasive that it hardly needs some sort of scarecrow propstand to scare away the vultures by showing them their own shadow. What is important is the image and how it is promoted and who is reached.

... Image is vastly more important than substance, and I just can't stress this enough. If art and music have taught us nothing more it is simply that. Marketing is replacing substance with image and this is how it should be. This is evolution of consciousness.

I wonder what Heather Mac Donald would say about Cicero's dialogue On the Nature of the Gods. In it, three friends spend an afternoon pondering the ultimate questions of religion. One of them expresses a weirdly postmodern view: We cannot know the nature of the Gods, but a good person knows in his gut the difference between right and wrong, and good people should venerate the religious rites and beliefs of their ancestors and fellows. Hence even agnostics have an important reason to revere religion.

When I go to mass, I am deeply moved by the ritual and symbols of the Catholic faith, the faith of my family through centuries and centuries. I feel a deep reverence for the Virgin Mary — even though I know that the Aramaic word from which "virgin" was translated not only does not imply virginity but in fact arguably implies the opposite. In fact, I revere the Christians symbols even though I see them more as the pagan artifacts of Imperial Rome, signifiers of how thoroughly the Romans obliterated the early church and then bothered to preserve only a few of its trappings. And consider Jesus on the Cross. As a symbol, it often strikes me as a morbid and indeed garish relic of primitive anthropology. Communion itself is based on a metaphor that is explicitly cannibalistic. From the visiting Martian's point of view, it's as if you were to base an entire religious on a snuff film that gets played at the start of every church service.

And yet for the past 2,000 years, the Cross has been the central symbol of God's love for us, the sacrifice of his only son for our sins, a symbol of the infinite grace and goodness of our Lord, of the source of all things in this vast benevolent universe. Because of what the cross meant and means to other Christians, because of its power to inspire charity, and service, and sacrifice, I worship it too. I'm not a particularly religious man, and I know that violent and brutish societies use religion as a veil for all sorts of heinous crimes. But I also think that when a society is healthy, like ours, religion can be a great good thing. Maybe I'm more Roman than Catholic, but I try to be a good Christian. And I hold the veneration of the venerable to be a civic duty — especially for a nation as blessed as ours.

Over the past few decades, studies have shown again and again that Americans tend to have a poor grasp of history. In fact, the scholar Christopher Lasch once wrote that Americans love nostalgia, because we see it as a form of entertainment. But we dislike real history, because real historical facts are inconvenient. Yesterday helps shape today. Real history places annoying obligations of truth on our present and future, and gets in the way of re-inventing ourselves.

As a result, quipped a teacher friend, “history is whatever we say it is, as long as we can get away with it.” I remembered her words recently as I read a news story. The story reported an Islamic leader as suggesting that it was European Christians, never Muslims, who tried to root out those who didn’t agree with them. Perhaps the reporter misunderstood the speaker. Perhaps the speaker made an honest mistake. Both Muslims and Christians have committed many sins against each other over the centuries. In the United States, we have an opportunity to overcome that difficult history and learn to live with each other in mutual acceptance. But respect can’t emerge from falsehood.

Catholics who do know history may remember the following:
Islam has embraced armed military expansion for religious purposes since its earliest decades. In contrast, Christianity struggled in its divided attitudes toward military force and state power for its first 300 years. No “theology of Crusade” existed in Western Christian thought until the 11th century. In fact, the Christian Byzantine Empire had already been resisting Muslim expansion in the East for 400 years before Pope Urban II called the First Crusade — as a defensive response to generations of armed jihad.

Much of the modern Middle East was once heavily Christian. Muslim armies changed that by imposing Islamic rule. Surviving Christian communities have endured centuries of marginalization, discrimination, violence, slavery and outright persecution — not always and not everywhere; but as a constant, recurring and central theme of Muslim domination.

That same Christian suffering continues down to the present. In the early years of the 20th century, the Muslim Ottoman Empire murdered more than 1 million Armenian Christians for ethnic, economic, but also religious reasons. Many Turks and other Muslims continue to deny that massive crime even today. Coptic Christians in Egypt — who, even after 13 centuries of Muslim prejudice and harassment, cling to the faith — continue to experience systematic discrimination and violence at the hands of Islamic militants.

Harassment and violence against Christians continue in many places throughout the Islamic world, from Bangladesh, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan and Iraq, to Nigeria, Indonesia and even Muslim-dominated areas of the heavily Catholic Philippines. In Saudi Arabia, all public expressions of Christian faith are forbidden. The on-going Christian flight from Lebanon has helped to transform it, in just half a century, from a majority Christian Arab nation to a majority Muslim population.

These are facts. The Muslim-Christian conflict is a very long one, rooted in deep religious differences, and Muslims have their own long list of real and perceived grievances. But especially in an era of religiously inspired terrorism and war in the Middle East, peace is not served by ignoring, subverting or rewriting history, but rather by facing it humbly as it really happened and healing its wounds.

That requires honesty and repentance from both Christians and Muslims. Comments like those reported in the recent news story I read — claiming that historically, it was European Christians, never Muslims, who tried to root out those who disagreed with them — are both false and do nothing to help.

... ever since the Enlightenment we've been trying see how many of the religious bricks we can pull out [of Western civilization] without making the whole thing collapse. This game of metaphysical Jenga is far from over, but the damage from it is pretty obvious in all sorts of areas. Personally, I don't know how far we can go before the whole thing crashes down — or whether it will collapse at all. But, I do believe that the sort of secular society and secular politics Heather [Mac Donald] lionizes — and which, truth be told, I do as well — is nonetheless indebted to, and sustained by, more of Christianity than simply its music.

Indeed, I always thought that it was the calling of modern conservatives in the tradition of Burke and Hayek to appreciate that we cannot know all of the ingredients in the civlizational soufflé. Our job, or so I thought, was to oppose sophisters and calculators who would attempt to clear of cobwebs of tradition and metaphysics with sliderules and unfurled blue prints.

What most people who talk about SD miss is that each stage develops as a corrective to the previous stage, and that each stage is the result of biopsychosocial responses to specific life conditions. For example, you simply will not see much Orange/rationalist/achiever-self development in a pre-industrial society -- the conditions are not present for such an adaptation to occur.

In order for SD to make sense, we really need to add the integral component and make it SDi -- Clare Graves intuited this long before Ken Wilber stumbled upon the quadrants. Graves was looking at all the ways that people respond to increasing complexity and new challenges, including the interior (personal and collective) and the exterior (new social structures and biological adaptation in the form of complex patterning in neurons and changes in neurotransmitter levels). There is much more to SDi and Gravesian theory than most people grasp, so it tends to look useless and/or that it mangles reality.

His whole "not my opinion, I'm just throwing it out there, expanding upon it, and not offering countering opinions—but its not my opinion" routine, followed by the classic "sycophantic e-mail of the day" that lauds Mr. Sulivan for his intelligence, independence, or principles—and sometimes all three at the same time.