I subscribe to a wonderful literary magazine called The Sun. On the back page of every issue is a feature called Sunbeams, these are quotes from famous and not-so famous people and the wisdom I glean from this page is always welcome. This month's topic in The Sun was religion and two quotes on the back page resonated with me. The first bit of wisdom comes from Jonathan Swift; "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."

The second comes from Mark Twain and could be viewed as prophetic; "Man is kind enough when he's not excited by religion, but once the holy holies have got a grip on him he's capable of almost anything. When a disciple from the wildcat religious asylum comes marching forth, get under the bed. It doesn't matter whether he's a Christian, Hindu, Jew or Muslim. If he's made up his mind that you need reforming, he will do it with anything handy-an ax, eight hundred years of witch burning or if necessary, he'll blow you up."

Muslim scholar Ebrahim Moosa is the featured interview and I found his remarks very enlightening. In June 2001, just three months before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Moosa delivered a commencement address at Stanford University, in which he warned of international outrage over the double standards in U.S. foreign policy. "Even those of us who think we are safe and secure from the anger of the disgruntled and teeming millions can no longer be safe in our own homes and lands. We sleep uneasy if people are hungry and angry, even if they are continents away."

Christians in the United States of America often speak of being persecuted and having their free expression of their faith restricted and yet so many of those same people ridicule the faith and beliefs of other religious devotees. The prevailing attitude would seem to be that I'll support your religious beliefs and freedoms so long as they agree with mine. If not...you're on your own.

Americans want to be safe, secure, happy, healthy and wealthy and they want to be insulated from the poverty, pain and misery of people in far away lands. Our isolation and selfishness has made us seemingly uncaring of the world around us. Our demand for cheap and abundant oil has led us to support tyrannical regimes that enslave their people for the benefit of cheap labor. Our refusal to accept or even attempt to understand our role in propping up Saddam Hussein has led us to believe that we were freeing the Iraqi people by invading their country. How many Americans know that the chemical weapons used to kill thousands of Kurds were made in Virginia and sold to Iraq by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney?. How many Americans know that our ally Pakistan is harboring Osama bin Laden and his gang and making it possible for these terrorists to go back and forth across the border between Pakistan and Iraq?

How can we possibly say or believe that Saddam Hussein was any more evil or intolerant than the current leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Pakistan, Libya and North Korea? When you embark on a policy of pre-emptive war, who gets to decide which despots are overthrown? Apparently access to lucrative natural resources like oil make some countries more attractive to us than others.