I will have to go back and read every word carefully, I think this is an excellent thread. And I admire Praise for posting it. If moonchild (whom I admire also) minds so much, I recommend not reading it any more. But I'm going to chime in now about a few things:

1) Fanatics always give their cause a bad name.
2) Nobody is responsible, or should be held so, for the actions of their ancestors/predecessors. However, that does not detract from how nice it is for Praise to apologize for hers. 3) There was a great map a few months ago in Time or Newsweek, showing warfare all over the world with columns for how many dead. I'd post a reprint if I could find one. ALL OF THESE TOWERS represented some kind of religious conflict except the Hutus and the Tutsis (the map predated Kosovo, not a religious conflict either). Very few of them involved Christians. But if you read Reader's Digest, or other Western less-newsy more-fun periodicals, there are always articles about how persecuted Christians are. However, sorry Mbo and others, Christians are not the current target of much ORGANIZED (by governments) warfare, the way Jews and Moslems are. Examples: Bosnia (Christians against Moslems); The Middle East (Moslems and Jews against each other); Kosovo (Christians against other Christians, so yes the vics were Christian but it isn't a religious persecution as so were the perps).
4) I do not consider that I have personally suffered much from religious intolerance. Sure, I find it incredibly annoying, and where I currently live rather inescapable (Christians against anyone else her in the Old Dominion), but it wasn't ME who suffered through (or didn't manage to suffer all the way through) the Holocaust, it was my mother's Jewish family. It wasn't ME who was made into a guinea-pig for medical experiments by a government supposedly formed specifically to protect religious freedom but which, in fact, did not support conscientious objection to warfare on religious grounds, it was my Quaker father.

Anyway, I'll go back when I have more time and read this thread more thoroughly. Then I'll post again, with more thought. But I agree that this forum should be musicians discussing what interests them, which is often but not exclusively music.