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To: thames_sider who wrote (336)	3/1/2002 9:20:01 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 21057

It is not much of a stretch to call Hinduism "quasi- monotheistic", but Shinto is not really, I just wanted to correct a misstatement. In any event, at this point, in determining what to believe, one cannot set aside the reflections of philosophers in discriminating among various traditions. The way you characterized it, the Crusades were merely a matter of administering a butt kicking to prove that "my God is better than your God". That is inaccurate. It is certainly true that adventurism played a role in the process, and people tried to carve out various territories for themselves, but it started as coming to the aid of Byzantium, and the occasion where Constantinople was sacked was because the Byzantines failed to keep up their end of a bargain to help defray expenses. You are being dogmatic in asserting that there is no underlying meaning. The fact that alternative explanations exist does not mean that something is not true, it only means that one is not compelled to accept it. If there were a bunch of people who cheered those who blew up school buses full of American children, maybe you would be bitter too. Improvement is meaningless without a standard. The Nazis could manufacture meaning too, and, since the core group accepted the idea that values were created by the Volk, and incommensurable with the standards of other Volken, they were confident that improvement involved the hegemony of the Teutonic peoples over other racial groups, in a hierarchy, and a Jew- free world. Since the propensity to believe is a predominant trait among human beings, on an evolutionary basis, it must be useful.