Yup! Where it gets ugly is when folks assume that all the population of Teheran and environs are medieval idiots. Not so.

Although it doesn't get much press here, it does get some. Against a fairly cranky government, there are what is more-or-less the equivalent of the kind of student protests that took place here in the U. S. in the 1960s. Traveler's in Iran say that most Iranians like and are friendly toward American tourists—and toward America in general—perhaps a bit more friendly that their government would like them to be.

The way to defuse the situation is not to try to order the Iranian government around and impose boycotts and sanctions, but to—as Ray Ramsey, the weatherman said—do the friendliest thing:   talk, discuss, negotiate, maintain lines of communication.

After all, and like a lot of Christians who don't really know a helluva lot about the teachings of Jesus, a lot of Muslims don't really know all that much about what Mohamed said.

And one of the things Mohamed said was, "If you kill one human being, it is as if you have killed the whole world." In other words, don't!

So those fanatics who talk young folks into turning themselves into bombs are, in a word, disobeying the commandments of the Prophet.

Lest we forget, there are some darn good reasons for a lot of Middle Easterners to be a bit crabby toward Europeans and Americans. Nearly a thousand years ago, a bunch of goons wearing tin suits went over there to beat the crap out of them for no particular reason, and ever since then, we've been ordering them around, telling them how to run their affairs, and plundering their natural resources. And we're still at it!

I think I'd get a bit sore, too!

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And GUEST,Pastinaken:

More than one deranged serial killer, when caught, has said, "I killed them because God told me to!"

I don't think one can fairly blame God for that!

There are lots of insane ideas floating around out there, based on personal interpretations of all kinds of sources, from trying to read things into the Mayan calendar that aren't really there, to reading a scientific article and misunderstanding much of it, to skipping around in the Bible and cherry-picking particular verses, taking them out of context, and putting them together in ways that make them sound as if they mean something entirely different.

I don't think one can fairly blame the Mayans, the scientist who wrote the article, or the Bible for the dark spiders that crawl around inside some peoples' heads.

If there were a commandment in the Bible that said, "Thou shalt go forth at night and slay young women with a knife," then I would say that David Berkowitz, better known as "the Son of Sam" serial killer in New York in the 1970s could honestly say that what he was doing was his religious duty.

But there is no such commandment.

Don Firth