Eastern Promises (A Christian Movie Review)

This film is so offensive to the morality and cleanliness of a Christian mind, I must urge people not to watch it. You cannot mix clean water with dirty water and get clean water; your mind is something worth protecting.

Without spoilers, I will list the offenses:

As with most mob/organized crime movies, most of the characters are deplorable, and the movie goes to lengths to shock us with how commonly, every-day brutal these people are. But what tips the scale is that the film deals with, essentially, human trafficking. As the name implies, the film shows how young (often underage) Russian girls are tricked into coming West and then forced into prostitution.

UNDERAGE CHILDBIRTH:
The opening scene of the movie has a grisly murder, but the very next scene depicts a 14 year-old girl coming to a pharmacy for help, and then leaking lots of blood from between her legs and feinting. She dies in childbirth (to go further is to introduce spoilers).

UNDERAGE SEX:
In a later scene, the son of the local crime boss and his second are enjoying themselves in the locked room where the forced prostitutes are kept. Some of the girls are enjoying themselves, but most seem scared and act perfunctory. The son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), forces Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen, "Aragorn" from the Lord of the Rings) to have sex with one of the girls to prove he isn't queer. Nikolai does so in a graphic sex scene with one of the underage girls, easily distinguishable by her underdeveloped breasts. It is hardly something I ever needed to see that particular actor do, let alone any two people in the world.

KNIFE FIGHT VERSUS A NUDE OPPONENT:
Another protracted scene features two men armed with knives attacking a naked mobster. During the fight scene, no effort was made to hide the victim's nudity, and several full-frontal nudity shots are presented. The fight is also accurate in its depiction of a knife-fight. As a weathered Jujitsu expert from Japan once told me, "If you ever get in a knife fight, expect to get cut. It's just going to happen. The goal is to live, not to avoid getting cut."

INNOCENCE DOESN'T MATTER:
Mild spoiler: In the movie, a baby's life is consistently threatened; in one graphic scene she is taken to a river to be drowned.

CLOSING:
So, while the quality of the movie is good, the acting is good, the movie is such an affront to the Christian mind that such kind, beneficent people really do not need to see this.

The Natural History of the Only Child

Wired has a decent article on why family sizes are shrinking, called "The Natural History of the Only Child."

"exactly why families are shrinking is a mystery. Rising living standards seem to have something to do with it. It's certainly true that as living standards rose in England -- as children died less from diseases, as the country overall became richer -- the size of the English family shrank. When other countries became wealthier, their families shrank, too. These days, affluent countries tend as a rule to have smaller families than poor ones."

I have read and written thoughts about this before, but the key the author found was a good one: It is the biological idea of what it costs to raise a child. As the idea moves from "I have to feed them and have them so they can help me survive" to "I have to feed them and clothe them and send them to college" to "I have to feed them and clothe them and buy them lots of things and send them to college and I want a big screen TV", we have less children, just as animals weigh their ability to "pay" the cost of having offspring.

"It turns out that animals have evolved a balance between offspring and effort. Some can even adjust how many offspring they produce, depending on whether they are under stress or live comfortably. Ruth Mace, an expert on family size at Imperial College London, argues this week in the journal Science that humans are governed by the same kinds of rules. When the standard of living goes up, the cost of living goes up too. It takes a family in Addis Ababa (the urban capitol of Ethiopia) a lot more money to raise an additional child than a family out in the Ethiopian countryside. That may be one reason why the population is exploding in rural Ethiopia, while in Addis Ababa it is actually shrinking."

Of course, some people, such as myself, make the conscious decision that "I can't pay for all of them to go to college, so I will have to raise them to work hard and get good grades", in other words, downgrade what is perceived as necessary to raise a child, and then we have more children.

"If Mace is right, then as long as the world keeps creeping out of poverty, families will continue to shrink. How small they can go is an open question. But perhaps we should stop thinking of families with only children as some odd fluke of neurotic New York life. It's just human biology played out to a logical extreme."

ChristianAnswers.net selects my review of Rambo

ChristianAnswers.net selected my review of Rambo (IV) and added it to their site. I was quite pleased to see that they had selected and made one edit to my review. It is the third "Positive" review, listed under my real name.

Their one edit is highly appropriate: they remove reference to the Missionaries in the film appearing to be Protestant (check the original review in the post before this). I have reproduced it here:

Positive - Many folks will go into “Rambo” expecting an action film, and, if critics are to be believed, a mediocre-to-poor movie experience. While horrendous, nihilistic films such as “No Country for Old Men” are lauded, Stallone's latest movie, daring to elicit images of faith and Christianity in a world gone wrong, is slammed.

True to form, this is a movie about the brutality and evil human beings are capable of; expect cursing, God's name called in vain, townspeople being killed in ethnic cleansing and sadistic games, local women being sexually assaulted (although the actual rapes are omitted) and a high body count as the rescue team / mercenaries clash with the Burmese Army, or SDPC.

As with the first three “Rambo” films, the fourth movie functions as a beacon to Western moviegoers to the plights of a people who are, for whatever reason, not receiving proper media attention. The first film was concerned with the treatment of returning Vietnam Veterans, the second film dealt with the possibility of American POWs in Vietnam, the third film was about Russia's War against Afghanistan, and the fourth film is about the systematic slaughter and relocation of various ethnic groups in Burma or Myanmar.

In the movie, appropriately, two theological camps are depicted:
While John J. Rambo, at the outset of the movie, seems atheistic, the mercenary commander (Graham McTavish) is openly so, famously saying to a Christian Missionary he is rescuing “God didn't save you, I did.”

The Christian Missionaries, on the other hand… speak to all Christian values, and this is important. At no time are any of them displayed as losing their faith, and the wife of the mission leader never casts an eye towards John Rambo over her husband, although she does attempt to reach him through words. The effect of this, you will have to see the film and wait for the ending.

The film is ultimately more complicated than its surface; it serves to educate through entertainment, without beating the viewer over the head as to its Christian message (which will appear subtle to non-Christians who don't know what to look for), but giving the viewer a thorough thrashing as to the harsh realities of war and abject cruelty of people over another, largely defenseless, group. Do not take your children, but do watch this movie.

My Ratings:

• Moral rating: Better than Average
• Moviemaking quality: 4.5

—David Rodriguez, age 32

"Rambo IV" is Deeper than it Surface: A Christian Review

Many folks will go into "Rambo" expecting an action film and, if critics are to be believed, a mediocre to poor movie experience. While horrendous, nihilistic films such as "No Country for Old Men" are lauded, Stallone's latest movie, daring to elicit images of faith and Christianity in a world gone wrong, is slammed.

True to form, this is a movie about the brutality and evil human beings are capable of; expect cursing, God's name called in vain, townspeople being killed in ethnic cleansing and sadistic games, local women being sexually assaulted (although the actual rapes are omitted) and a high body count as the rescue team / mercenaries clash with the Burmese Army, or SDPC.

As with the first three "Rambo" films, the fourth movie functions as a beacon to Western moviegoers to the plights of a people who are, for whatever reason, not receiving proper media attention. The first film was concerned with the treatment of returning Vietnam Veterans, the second film dealt with the possibility of American POWs in Vietnam, the third film was about Russia's War against Afghanistan, and the fourth film is about the systematic slaughter and relocation of various ethnic groups in Burma or Myanmar.

In the movie, appropriately, two theological camps are depicted:

While John J. Rambo, at the outset of the movie, seems atheistic, the mercenary commander (Graham McTavish) is openly so, famously saying to a Christian Missionary he is rescuing "God didn't save you, I did."

The Christian Missionaries, on the other hand, feel protestant yet speak to all Christian values, and this is important. At no time are any of them displayed as losing their faith, and the wife of the mission leader never casts an eye towards John Rambo over her husband, although she does attempt to reach him through words. The effect of this, you will have to see the film and wait for the ending.

The film is ultimately more complicated than its surface; it serves to educate through entertainment, without beating the viewer over the head as to its Christian message (which will appear subtle to non-Christians who don't know what to look for), but giving the viewer a thorough thrashing as to the harsh realities of war and abject cruelty of people over another, largely defenseless, group.

Do not take your children, but do watch this movie.

"WHY THE AMERICAN FLAG IS FOLDED 13 TIMES"

THIS IS FALSE. For one, anyone who can read all of this and believe the original flag folders had all of this in mind is silly. For another, "Symbolizing George Washington's hat"? That should send off another BS meter.

Apologies for being gruff but everyone needs to wake up and start checking sources, so pardon me for taking a page out of Patton's modus operandi...

I am amazed, flabbergasted, at how much stuff people forward without checking for sources. This is one thing that helped spread hatred of the Jews in France - people just listening to a few and not thinking for themselves, only saying "Hey, that's what I wanted to hear anyway!" and latching onto it. Somewhere out there - Muslim fathers are forwarding each other horror stories describing what happens when men let their daughters lead their own lives, and they eat it up.

Whenever I get this stuff I check it on www.Snopes.com, so much so that a friend of mine now does so just to avoid me correcting him.

It doesn't matter if something says what you want to hear (remember Anti-Semetism, and recall that a lot of people back then were predisposed to such thoughts), it matters what is real and valid. We should base our lives around truth, not fantasy.

I always teach my children to question things. "I like this." "Why?" "Because it's fun." "Why?" The annoying repeater is the father, not the child. By age 10, my oldest daughter has become so adept at enumerating the whys of things that come under her purview that she came home from a weekend with her grandparents and told me "My grandmother is better without her medicine if she just drinks water, so whenever she asked for soda I gave her water."

All I can do is just stand there and look shocked, and await the day these powers are used on me (lovingly, but it'll happen).

Everyone here is an adult, right?
So ask "Why?"

Note: I sent this in a reply to a general forward I got. Aren't I a jerk about truth?

The Abdication of Parenting

Freelance writer and former Atari public relations manager W. Jayson Hill has subjected himself to six months working video game retail. He sheds some light on the topics of used game sales, the ESRB and parents, console launch windows and more.

[Source Article]
While the article is interesting for how it illustrates the "front lines" of game retail stores, what strikes me the most is the section on parents, their children, and "mature" rated games. There are three kinds of parents, Mr. Hill says:

1. Parents who follow the letter of the law. If their twelve year-old wants a "teen" game, tough luck - wait a year. These are the rarest.
2. The Ad-Hoc parents who make obscure value judgments such as "It's okay to buy games with violence and chop peoples head's off but it's not okay to have semi-naked bodies in the game." This makes up the vast majority.
   
3. Parents who abdicate all responsibility.

The last major subspecies of game-buying parent is not quite as numerous as the ad hoc decider. However, they seem to far outnumber the parents that worship at the alter of strict ESRB adherence. But these parents are also the ones that are most insidious. They let their kids have any game he or she selects – ratings and content be damned.

The excuses vary widely on why this attitude prevails. My personal favorite was the parent who said, "Well, it's nothing he didn't see on 'CSI' last night." At this point it took a supreme effort on my part not to reach over the counter, snatch this woman up by the collar and demand to know why she was letting a 7-year-old watch a program that regularly features half-decomposing and cut up corpses. The sad thing is that she also struck me as the type of individual that would cheer on a politician in favor of putting into government hands the very responsibility she had so blithely abdicated.

That last bit sums everything up for me. I hate, with a passion, the Public School System. It sucks. It's stupid. It was formed during America's Industrial Revolution. It has changed from being a service provider (education) to a care-taker of children, of which is it more delinquent at than most parents.

The femenist movement in America, however necessary, didn't bring about equal pay for the sexes, it reduced mens' pay by 2/3rds, to the point at which now both sexes must work to keep the same family one man used to be able to. With that, comes the destruction of family, and with that, the willful abandon that parents give today where they just don't want to do the parenting thing - they have jobs, or something else they'd rather do, and with that, politicians who say schools should support kids more because they aren't supported enough. The whole cycle makes me sick.

Battlestar Galactica - is it based on Mormonism?

More accurately ...is it based on Mormon themes?

When confronted by things I don't know, rather than say "I don't know" or "It's all based on conjecture" I try to see if I can find the truth. This is merely a thought exercise - can I find the truth? Did Glen A. Larson, a prolific writer and TV series creator, make this particular project based on elements of his religion, Mormonism?

In my gathering of research material, I found one interview with the new Battlestar Galactica executive producer that clinched the whole deal:

Interviewer:

"Glen Larson, creator and producer of the first show, is a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints. He based much of the first series on Mormon cosmology. Was there a concerted effort to move away from that in this version?"

Ron Moore:

"Not specifically, no. I looked at the original series as mythos and the way it dealt with religion as sort of a global sense. I was aware that Glen had used Mormon influences and how he had created the cosmology, but I'm not that familiar with Mormon belief or practice. To me there were things that were sort of obvious, the twelve tribes, the twelve tribes of Israel."

Unless Ron Moore is lying, he's acknowledging that the old series was, indeed, based on Mormon themes, and that while the new series is not expressly based on Mormon themes, no effort was made to change the mythos of the old show.

The article goes on to reveal that, in the new version, Ron gave the Cylons their own belief system, and it was monotheism, whereas the humans had polytheism, which created parallels - he said - with the Romans and the way Pagan religions fell to monotheistic ones.

So it is safe to say that the new series, however based on the mythos of the old, is going its own direction. It is also safe to say that the old series really is based on Mormon themes.

Research Material

• Battlestar Mormonica - Deals directly with whether or not the series is based on Mormon themes.
• Battlestar Galactica and Mormonism - another article.
  
• Battlestar Galactica Frequently Asked Questions - First created: May 24, 1994, Last modified: November 26, 2002 - this means this FAQ is a good snapshot of "Before the new series"
• Articles and Interviews about the old series - lists "FORD, James E. “Battlestar Galactica and Mormon Theology” Journal of Popular Literature. A Professor at BYU takes a close look at Mormon ideas in BG." Also cited as: Ford, James E. “Battlestar Galactica and Mormon Theology.” Journal of Popular Culture 17 (fall 1983): 83–87.
• The Souls of Cylons - Ron Moore, executive producer of Battlestar Galactica, talks about the theology behind the Sci Fi Channel series.
• Observations on the correlation between Battlestar Galactica and the LDS Church - this is what first clued me into the question.
  

More about the Author

• Glen A. Larson at the Internet Movie Database
• Glen A. Larson at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Glen A. Larson on Wikipedia
  

I originally found the first article on Bill Otto's page. I was there because his home page has synopses on the Connections series by James Burke.

Connections: Rationalism, God, Kids, and Waking Up

A friend of mine has inadvertently managed to cut a knife through my years and years of upbringing which has taught me I'm a flawed and useless mind. Flawed, yes, anyone with AADD (Adult Attention Deficit Disorder), by definition, is - but useless?

His net effect is that I've found the joy I used to take when I was young in engaging my brain in things. Growing up about the only TV I watched were nature shows, PBS (Public Broadcasting System), Doctor Who, original Star Trek, some cartoons, and Night Court. I enjoyed horseback rides and spending hours and hours not playing videogames, but drawing and making up my own worlds - which I do to this day every time I'm walking by myself.

So I bit torrented the first season of James Burke's Connections and, while some of it is out of sync and the 70's film quality doesn't hold up well, it's still just an incredible series, and it's got me thinking.

God
You see, I have a rather rational mind. I recall, watching something Carl Sagan put together, learning that 95% of the world believed in some sort of God. My immediate response was "95% of the world is stupid?" I am no longer an atheist, but that's not by choice, but by personal experience. Believe me, if faith was all I had - I would still be the staunchest atheist you could find who really didn't care to spread it around or use it to say "I can do whatever I want," which is what almost every other atheist I ever met did, and I didn't like them, but that didn't matter to me at the time, because rational thought mattered more than emotional beings.

Suffice it to say, I do not believe in coincidences anymore than God or a policeman does, and aside from this, I've seen proof that the world isn't as simple as what we can normally observe. Beyond that, I can't tell you anything - what religion to follow, what ethics to follow, I can just tell you - the tree is there, even if nobody sees it or believes it, and I get the sense that the tree isn't anymore damaged by a lack of belief than a tree in this world. It just is. I make no effort to explain it because I'm rational enough to believe the only way to explain it would be through the scientific process, and I don't have the tools I'd need to do that. It's also pointless, because as much effort as some people put into believing in God, others put into disbelieving. It almost always boils down to emotional need.

I've also found that I still enjoy rationals more than true believers in Christ because they're capable of thinking without boundaries. My wife is a wonderful exception - she'd be akin to some of the scientific Catholic friars of old - devout to the physical secular world as well as the clerical one. You can't bring scientific information to her that she doesn't want to accept because, to her, all proven science is part of the world, from Dinosaurs to ancient man to the vastness of the cosmos, it fascinates her. There was a time she'd have been burned, or, like the old friars, carefully researched away from prying eyes.

At any rate, the thinking rationals put into the workings of the world interests me more because they aren't afraid to say "Fanatical religion = bad" and so on. For some stupid reason, most followers of faith don't want to admit that there is any bad associated with what they do.

The flip-side, of course, is rampant liberalism and the problem this brings with rearing children, but I digress...

It Helps My Life
Anyway, rational thinking has got me thinking about the world again, like I used to do more of - how news is spread, information twisted, how societies and civilizations work, how change happens (thanks to Connections) and how we are all caught up in it. The Internet wasn't around in the 70's, but it was on the drawing board, so to speak.

This, in turn, has given me another hobby I can engage in with my wife. You see, my lovely armchair anthropologist (she's had college level courses in anthropology but, as she was a traditional Franciscan Nun at the time, she was not allowed to collect a paper degree, so she has no proof other than quizzing her) goes so far as to take a notebook and colored pens to make notes on everything she sees, so much so that she cross-references what one documentary says with another.

Testing My Daughters
Back on Connections: I actually wrote up a written test for my 10 year old daughter, Maria, 9 questions in total, dealing with the first episode. My wife tried to tell me it was too much, and I realized it was, so I added money to the pot: $1 per every two questions answered. 1 question was rhetorical.

Dulce participated passively, by watching the show and then observing Maria giving her answers.

Maria de Guadalupe couldn't write down her answers, so I transcribed for her. It was made especially difficult because her reward for beating up a 13 year-old black ghetto boy (poor kid, but this is basically where I live, so I might as well write it like it is) arrived the same day - she was stuck: she wanted to have fun with her reward, but I told her "If you don't do your Connections work today, you won't make any money. You'll still have to watch it, but you'll have no questions and no opportunity to make money. This is how the world works, Maria. If someone asks you to do something for them and they are willing to pay you, you can't tell them 'Maybe next week.' "

She eventually saw my point. Her questions weren't entirely correct, but I kept telling her as I transcribed "I don't care if you're completely correct, I care that I've made you think." She earned $4 in roughly 2 hours of work - one hour spent watching the first episode by herself, and another reviewing it and saying her answers with me when I got home. She's lucky if she can make $4 in an entire day of chores, so she was amazed at the work/reward ratio, and asked if she could do more.

Mexican Jew. She likes work and spots ways of making easy money fast. *chuckles*

The questions:

• Connections: "The Trigger Effect" - lists all of the questions I wrote down for Maria, and the answers I transcribed for her.
  

The questions ranged from "What would happen if there was no electricity in our house? How could we survive if it never came back on?" to "What happens to a city if it loses electricity permanently? What do the people do?" to "Why is the plow so important to civilization?"

Her answers ranged from bits of ideas to pure accuracy based on what James Burke said. I'll post it here. Dulce was interested, but is 7 - I can't do this to her just yet, but I'm glad she wanted to observe.

How many 7 year-old little girls do you know who want to watch Connections, twice?

Summary

• Watching Connections has helped rekindle my questioning of the way things are, and why.
• Dove's daily commentary and friendship helped spur all of this.
• I love asking my children why, and not focusing on their answer, just that I made them think.
  

PS to Kevin - The other religious friend of mine whom I find capable of rational thought is Kevin, in Virginia. He's got some hard and fast views, but that's what makes him a great person - he'll never betray a confidence, and never betray a person, because he's incapable of it. Jack Bauer could torture the man, and he'd stay firm. On the flip-side, that means you can't question President Bush or the PS3 ;)

And I love him like that. Too few people have firm minds. His is just one (firm mind) that is unusually free from being stuck in the mud, so to speak.

PS to Dove - I know he's not big on compliments, but I hope he realizes that he's made my life a bit better, and that is pretty much the best thing someone can say about a friend.

PS about Dave - I am an INTJ. I am aware this makes me more apt to thinking rational thought and working systems is far more important than emotional concerns, which don't affect how the world works, only what you do in it.

In the title, "Waking up" refers to my re-realization that my mind, while beneath super geniuses, is still useful, and fun to exercise.

Proud of my 10 Year-Old Daughter

My 10 year-old daughter, Maria de Guadalupe, had her first real fight with a boy on Sunday, April 29th. The subject was one black 13 year-old boy, who was surrounded by his four friends, roughly equaling his age.

The fight, like so many real fights, was very quick, and really only involved one blow. At our local Southern Baptist Church, Harvest Baptist Church, some adults had handed one piece of candy to each child. The children went outside the back of the church (really a rented house) to play and eat.

We live in the North East section of town, which is predominantly black. Pastor David Middlebrooks and his his three sons, daughter and virtuous wife are also, and I love showing my son, Jose Francisco, the Pastor's grown sons, David, Darius (his third, DJ, is still at home), because they are such fine examples of good men. They're strong, smart, educated, and most definitely "mens' men." Jose Francisco's face lights up every time he sees them, and David and Darius call him their little buddy.

The young boys Maria dealt with, however, were new to the church, and undoubtedly did not come from as good a family as the Pastor's sons. When presented with one piece of candy a piece and a selfish desire for more, one of the boys decided to steal a piece of candy from a six year-old black girl.

Maria de Guadalupe stepped up to the 13 year-old boy. She's 101 pounds, 4'11", and most people, in part due to her height and in part due to her Latin blood endowing her earlier than white girls, think she's 12.

"You better give that back to her," she warned him. They quickly exchanged words, his to the effect of "No" with disdain and, upon one last warning from her that she'd make him, he and his friends laughed.

Now, bare in mind, I have taught Maria the basics of making a fist, forming a line with her hand bones and forearm, shown her how easy it is to gouge out an eyeball, where pressure points are, and the infamous "Kick them in the balls" trick. She'd nailed me there just the day before after I had, whilst sparring with her, hit her in the side of the ribs and her shoulder. I do these exercises for obvious reasons.

Maria was wielding, or wearing rather, large pump shoes. So she stomped on the 13 year old boy's foot so hard he nearly fell over. He hopped on one foot, she said, and yelped and nearly cried, but looked at his friends and "looked like my brother, realizing he was a boy and couldn't cry."

I asked her "What did his friends do?"

"They looked like 'We're not going to mess with her.' " And they didn't, nor was anyone else's candy stolen.

I told her that she did just the right thing, and that had he responded by punching her in the face, or continuing the fight, she would have gone after him just like she does me when she's had enough. "You would have come back at him so hard he would be unable to keep 'playing.' " I told her. She just said "Yep."

She was embarrassed at the attention I lavished on her, and wasn't proud of the fight but rather what she accomplished with it: the gave the piece of candy back to the six year-old girl, and her look was one of happiness and amazement.

Bare in mind that none of her siblings were around; Dulce Maria was still inside with Jose Francisco and Alejandrita, which Dulce confirmed of course. The 20 year-old daughter of an adult member of the church had stepped inside, apparently being bored. So Maria was outside, without an adult, facing 5 older boys, and it didn't matter. Even so, it was a battle well picked - she hit the ringleader, hit him while he was laughing and not expecting it, hit him with the only weapon she had (her thick pump shoes) right where it would work the best - in the fragile bones of the feet, which I've also shown her in the past.

(To be precise, her strike was aimed not at toes, but at the metatarsal bones of the foot.)

God, I love these children.

Maria knew the ages of the boys because newcomer kids give their name and age at the start of the service.

Oh! And her reward: I'm thinking of two options - buying her a $54 DVD set of Planet Earth (she loves nature shows but dislikes the "in your face" style of the late Croc Hunter) - or something else she and her sisters might enjoy: WiiPlay which bundles another Wii Remote. If you have any opinions on the two, please drop them in my comments.

Addendum
I made an addendum to this post. Maria read this blog post for accuracy and added a piece of the story she had omitted before.

Reading this is a bad idea

Justice for the victims of genocide seems unimportant compared to political concerns. I'm talking about Srebrenica, where over 8,000 men and boys between 60 and early teens, some younger, were massacred as they tried to evacuate the city (a column of refugees traversed a road and the Serbs used artillery and anti-air guns to massacre them). Others were lured into "surrendering" and bussed to mass execution sites (blindfolded and bound on the way as to ensure no effective resistence to the final moment).

The Serbian government has been cleared, legally, of all involvement with the genocidal actions of its armies.

It seems justice only comes to those with the power to enforce it. Is this news anything new?

My views on Islam

I read this article. Before continuing you should too, or this post will seem racist and you will lack context.

----

I think that most of Islam (in my ignorance of particulars of the subject I cannot say "all") can be summed up by this, something Thomas Jefferson wrote of a meeting with an ambassador of the Barbary States (concerning their attacking and enslavement or ransoming of American sailors):

"The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise."

Islam is, and remains, a hostile religion bent on death to the infidel, which stands in direct contrast to the foundations of our nation -- which is why they really hate us. We embody religious freedom, and they embody the opposite of it.

I've read of a U.S. Justice who, when sentencing an Islamic extremist who used a bomb and tried to say he was a holy soldier, said he couldn't fathom the hate -- and surmised that it was our freedom that they despised the most.

(Concerning the U.S. in history) To me, the will that compels a man to give his life for a country that extols that the men he dies defending have the right to live contrary to everything he believes (while not harming others) -- is far greater a sacrifice than giving your life for people you know are just like you.