Hi Brendan-
After thinking about the similarity between the Inquisition and our present day, I came to thje conclusion that all those people who sit around Washington passing wise airs through their elite backsides are equally fundamentalist medmen. The only reason that this isn't recognized is that there are so many of them in one spot. If you were to transport a typical modern political leader to a soap box in Central Park, where he would rant against the Bill of Rights as an unnecessary inconvenience to government, he'd be booed and laughed out of town. As everyone knows, we already have enough megalomanics in our world. But when speaking from the seat of government  to others who share the same fundamentalist fury, such words are viewed as wise and useful, and we start reinventing the nation so that we can arrest without habeas corpus, imprison incommunicado without trial or recourse, torture people just for the hell of it, deny public assembly where it might be a political inconvenience and so on. Some of these people even feel that it is possible to create world peace by attacking their neighbors, and they can't understand why people who have been attacked feel hostile and ungrateful. (Or, in terms of the Inquisiotion, we'll burn them at the stake to save their immortal souls. Surely they will thank us for this.)

The interesting thing, with respect to the forum, is that these are signs of people who are living in their own BSTs, just as surely as if they werre already dead and wormy in their self-righteus pits.

We have no Malleus Malificarum here, but we do have common sense. Common sense and a little spiritual acumen suggests that these must be very young and immature souls who are blundering about. They do not operate on the basis of logic because theyd do not understand logically. Instead, they operate on faith (fundamentalism's ultimate recourse) and through their faith they "know" that all they need to do is to kill off half the world, and the rest will be happily at peace. (Of course this brings paranoia about the world's opinion and possible recourse to this treatment.

While we talk here about BSTs as being a trap for the obsessive soul, sticking them into a cosmic glue from which they are unable to extricate themselves, the true issue is that these spiritual factors are manifested before all of us in the name of leadership. While we deal here with questions about enlarging the ability to love unconditionally, the BST of the leaders tells them that only through hatred and fear, with the force of an iron fist, can the world be made into a hapy and loving place.

Having said all of this, I suggest that the ultimate problem to which we all must eventually respond is how we are to rescue these stuck souls.

The problem is how to "cure" a person who is fundamentally engulfed by certainty that some kind of good comes from actiions based on destruction, resentment and distaste, thinking based on lies, deceit and dreams, and whose image of reality is a perpetual struggle of pain, hatred, force and violence. (Euthanasia comes to mind, but that's a bit extreme, and is of the same kind of error.) This is not an "abstract airey fairy spiritual problem". It is the encroachment of the mechanisms by which we create hell in the afterlife as these come into our present world. And, in that light, the problem of hell is that once we create it, our pride tends to keep us there. "Better by far to reign in hell than serve in heaven." Fundamentalist self-righteousness n religion is often farcical, but in the real world of human interaction it is a sign of a tremendous waste of resources.

The alternative is a world of accord, in which harmony is valued, and legislation is aimed at totally win-win strategies in place of polarization and power. This is available, but only after the BSTs are laid to rest.

dave