Yesterday, someone suggested that I try to look at this situation from the point of view of the Palestinians dancing in the streets in celebration of these terrorist attacks. I pondered that for a while, and my conclusion is that their mindset and their upbringing and their beliefs are so foreign to my own that I will never understand their point of view even if I try for a lifetime.

This conclusion was reinforced last night when I read a passage from Tobias Churton's "The Gnostics", which described an Egyptian man (the one who, with his brothers, discovered the Nag Hammadi documents) attacking and killing a man, then eating part of his heart, because the man had murdered his father. The author said that taking this sort of revenge was part of the tradition of the area.

Now, I can imagine feeling the urge to take revenge for the murder of my loved one, but I can't imagine doing the murdering, much less eating my victim's organs. I realized that people in the Egypt/Middle East area are raised and taught to act and react VERY differently from the way that American society operates today.

Walk a mile in their shoes? I can't walk a step in them.