No Mrr, I'm not American. I live in Europe. But I've been stateside (our word for the US) a few times. Thanks to a common langauge and the US' domninant position in world affairs i follow news from there, and have some sense of the culture as well. It seems to me to be a land of extremes - pacifists and gun-toting patriotic NRA all in the same land. Atheists and fundamentalist Christians. Perhaps if people could meet half way a bit more, it would help. To my outsiders view, it appears that Americans tend to view the world in very black or white terms, like Bush's 'your either with us or against us'. When I was in the US, I was surprised to find how few people had a passport or travelled outside the US. I suppose it's such a vast county that you have everything on your doorstep without having to go abroad. The culture of the US seems fairly uniform despite regional differences. The lanaguage is also widespread despite the rise of Spanish in Arizona and California.

In Europe on the other hand any time you go abroad you end up having to speak a different langauge, adjust to very different customs, eat different food (despite globalistaion) adjust to a different timetable (different shop opening hours for example), different cultures, until recently use different money. And you are still effectively ina different country, without a federal government (though Eurocrats hope to change all that soon).

So maybe we Europeans are more used to having to live alongside each other and adapt to difference. Maybe we realise there are many shades of grey, which is why most European countries were unenthusiastic about supporting Bush's simplistic world view of Muslims v. the civilised world.

For all that, the political scene in Europe these days is heavily atheist. You guys would be really happy here. The EU Commission a few years back got rid of one of their commissioners because they deemed him too 'religious' even though he promised to keep his religion a private matter. They knew what I have argued all along here - one's beliefs - religious or atheistic - can never be simply kept a private matter and one will always try and shape society according to them. But there is active hostility to religion from the political establishment here too. Having outgrown the need for church support in a heavily secularised world, political leaders are less wary of baring their atheistic teeth when the occasion rises. The way I see it, it may only be a matter of decades to a new kind of religious persecution. Already it is present here in the form of how religious people are ridiculed or singled out for villification by an secularistic and atheistic media.

BTW, I know rain comes from clouds... the comment was for Amos to figure out.... ;-)