Jeri - Oh, I see. Penis measurement. Heh! Well, that's amusing... I think you're right that most people come here to fight with each other. Pretty sad spectacle, isn't it?

Alan - That last post of yours sounds pretty reasonable to me. I follow your drift, and I'd say I pretty much agree with it. Children are better off not being roped into such activities as you describe.

In the same sense, they are better off not roped into quasi-religious political/social activities, such as was done in Hitler's Germany with the Hitler Youth or in China during Mao's Cultural Revolution with the Red Guards. (The Chinese Communists were positively religious in their fanatical atheistic fervour, ironically enough. They simply came up with new deities: Chairman Mao and The Communist Party. Pol Pot's Khymer Rouge did something quite similar and even worse. It is possible to be utterly religious in your behaviour...though officially without "God"...in the name of destroying organized religion, and it has been done several times now by large political movements.)

The Nazis cut it both ways. They invented a brand new religion: The Nazi Party, the Fuhrer, and the so-called Aryan master race (their holy trinity?)....but at the same time they gave very strong lip service to traditional Christian religion and they used it to motivate their troops and their civilians against "godless Communism" and against the Jews.