Jim...if I could answer that.....well, as amtter fo face, I can answer that, but like religious texts, I'd never get anywhere near agreement with my answers.

One problem is beginning to emerge from recent science, which I have suspected for a long time. Many aspects of our personality seem to be biological/accidental....i.e., an excess of testosterone...and various other physio-chemical influences. We have no trouble understanding that Pit Bulls are a breed of dog with certain tendencies to attack...while others are bred for sweet temprement. Wolverines attack, other animals hide....

Now, of course there are ways to influence these tendencies...Pit Bulls can be kept 'relatively' calm, and a Cocker Spaniel can be tormented until it is vicious. Look at other promates...Chimps will hunt and kill...Bonobos will cooperate and back away from conflicts.

I could go on all day listing animal species which have various degrees of antagonism built in...and we humans are only 30,000 years or so out of caves! WHY do we think we are above all that?

What to do? Now, there's the rub!...If the gentle parts of humanity want to protect themselves from the nastier parts...we NEED someone who is willing and able to BE mean and fight....and then we need them to calm down between fights!....Look at police forces! They struggle constantly with finding officers who have the guts to do the job, but won't abuse the powers and beat up and shoot people indiscriminately. We train, we admonish, we plead, we prosecute...but we still get bad cops.

And we get dumb people who are filled with hate...and we get smart people. Dumb ones run about and shoot up a few things and get stopped...smart ones hoodwink entire nations and become Hitlers and Pol Pots and Stalins and ....bin Ladens.......I suspect that, given a few different circumstances, bin Laden could have remained a quiet, rich Saudi, but he didn't.

One more point...while it will be nice to KNOW someday why evil people are as they are, and perhaps be able to 'fix' them with drugs..(they do treat sex offenders with libido fighting chemicals)...for now, our only recourse seems to be to eliminate them..if we can. We sadly put down a Pit Bull who seems beyond rehabilitation...now if somone would just figure out how to breed the vicious streak out them!

Humans? Selective breeding programs? *cynical smile*....Who gets to make THAT suggestion in open session at the UN? Are we stuck with just waiting until someone COMMITS the atrocity before we act? Seems like it. In the meantime, we put up bigger targets and create technological systems (like the one YOU are using right now) which might be vulnerable to idiots with bad attitudes. (What if the NEXT bin Laden is a computer genius?)

Solutions? None that we are willing to consider now. We still build in flood plains and trust our money to telemarketers and allow bail for most criminals.....and countries which TRY to have Draconian solutions seem to still have people willing to take the chance and kill, rob and lie.

I try every day to NOT be like a theologian as G. E. Moore defined them, but boy, it's HARD...............