The Dark Lord athwart his black throne-or not.... Have a day off for change. As I read the previously mentioned article on Islamists in the New Yorker, I began to reaffirm that these were people that would pull the world back from modernity, and barring that smash it like the one washed away by God, save Noah and his Ark. But they do not for battle nefarious reasons, a black-hearted inclination to destroy the lives of others. These are people that believe in a real God, who demands obedience. Perhaps in their own salvation, their paradise, there is an incentive, but they also believe that those who stray from the One Truth Path are going to hell in any case. Just like the Communists or Fascists before them, the leaders of the Islamist movement are strivers and achievers, at heart utopians. Perhaps in the soul-deadening moral relativism of the post-modern West isn't so bad a thing in comparison. What would have the inquisitors done with bombs and machine guns after all? Perhaps the with the passing of belief, and the attenuation of fanaticism, the West has discovered a peace that ancient man never knew.... Godless comments: I used to think that religion was the source of most of the world's woes. But atheists are no better, as the mass murders of the "godless communists" demonstrated. Ideological fervor is the real enemy.