Guest, are you saying that God used to work for Javier Solana??? I think I knew Javier back in the day. Gee, all these years, and I didn't know that.

And the inimitable Jim Carroll quotes:

"Give me a child for for his first seven years and I'll give you the man"

You call that brainwashing, Jim, and I call that education. You correctly ascribe that statement to the Jesuits, I think; and the Jesuits have rightly prided themselves in teaching "critical thinking" - teaching people to think for themselves in non-ideological ways.

To be honest, I sometimes think that you and some others here are incapable of thinking in non-ideological ways, and thus are incapable of comprehending that thought can be anything other than ideological. The popular phrase nowadays is "thinking outside the box" - and you can't do that and don't even understand what that means. Tolerance is impossible for you, because you see all of life as a battle of ideologies - and you are set on your ideology being on the winning side.

I think many of you need to break out of your shell and accept the fact that this wonderful world of ours is profoundly fucked up and always will be - and that's part of what makes it wonderful. There are no straight lines. Nothing is all good, and nothing is all bad - it is what it is, and that's quite wonderful.

-Joe-