 from stephen d williams mailto sdw lig net sent monday september NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER pm NUMBER which religion and how it is currently being expressed matters a which religion is it that can claim no foul actions in its past certainly not christianity islam etc hence the qualifier current b how it is currently being expressed amounts to a tacit acknowledgement that the sophistication of the society involved and people s self limiting reasonableness are important to avoid primitive expression this leads to the point that religion and less sophisticated societies are a dangerous mix it also tends to invoke the image of extremes that might occur without diligent maintenance of society the tacit acknowledgement and self limiting you speak of is not a given or a function of sophistication but is primarily a feature of current western civilization of course sophisticated and western civilization are essentially equivalent imho but it need not be so d the northern ireland protestant vs catholic feud recently more or less concluded is not completely unlike this kind of friction generated by splitting society too much along religious lines one post article pointed out that the problem basically stemmed from the vertical integration of areas along religious lines all the way to schools government political party etc of course both cases have a heritage of british conquest but who doesn t and sometimes the religious component is a façade for an equally dangerous ethnic affiliation hindu extremism isn t about the hindu religious theology as far as i can see it is a peg to hang an ethnic identity and identity politics on muslim extremism appears to have a far greater connection to theology northern ireland is a british province of green valleys and cloud covered hills whose NUMBER NUMBER million people are politically and religiously divided about NUMBER percent of the population is protestant and most protestants are unionists who want the province to remain part of britain the roman catholic minority is predominantly republican or nationalist they want to merge with the republic of ireland to the south yep all because the scots ate oats and starved their irish out long ago while the english preferred wheat and that doesn t grow so well in ireland that and the introduction of potatoes saved the irish as irish that s fine as it would be an inappropriate concentration it would be difficult to address the issues raised here in a clean way i d be happy with an acknowledgement that the connection is there oh i think we are in a war with wide aspects of the muslim religion i know it is there but it just might not be appropriate to admit it publicly NUMBER us leadership remains reflexively multi cultural this is ok to a point as long as it doesn t shy away from logical objective analysis of when a society could be seriously improved in certain ways i didn t say this was a good thing with the exception of ethnic restaurants i can generally be counted on to oppose anything labeled multi cultural i didn t say burning the train was a good thing i said i understood it wasn t a spontaneous attack on people who had done no wrong true although i don t think you were as clear originally i m sure i wasn t 