Clarity of thought seems best for me during the first half of the day, especially in the morning.  So here I sit jotting down my thoughts as they seem to appear from nowhere.  What seems to be disturbing my thoughts today and which has bothered me all my life has to do with the terrible way humans have continued to treat each other throughout history for thousands of years.

The older I get, and the more I observe of the goings on around me in the world today and what I read about the historical past, the more I feel like I've been given birth into an overcrowded madhouse of crazy people.  I observe a humanity manifesting such irrational behavior in human relationships it boggles the mind of a sane person.  For thousands of years, even with the growth in knowledge and information about ourselves and our physical reality, human beings exhibit such irrational and illogical behavior in how they treat each other that any change for social harmony seems hopeless.

Human violence is forever intertwined with economic prowess that is legitimized by institutionalized religion and implemented through politics.  For much of recorded history, people of all faiths have been killing each other in the name of their deities while riding the horse of economic conquest.  As I write this today the human world is flooded with a flurry of rhetoric dividing the world into good versus evil focusing on the historic schism between Christianity and Islam with the central target being economic control of a major resource, oil.

It is a fact that such polarization of the world has resulted in people of all faiths slaughtering one another in the name of their deity throughout most of history. Christians spent a few centuries sending Crusaders to kill Muslims in their shared Holy Land, then spent a few centuries fighting each other in the wars of religion between Catholics and the emergent Protestants.  Christian beliefs were used to advance colonial conquest and exploitation.  Religious beliefs have always been intertwined with violent acts.

Even today examples are never ending.  There is the fight between the Islamic world and the Jews in Israel, the struggle between the Hindus and Islamics in India, and rivals within the Islamic states as between conflicting Sunni and Shi'ite groups.  There are also the Sikh separatists in India and the warlike Buddhist cults in other parts of the world.  In Yugoslavia, we have the fight among the old lines dividing the Serbian Orthodox, the Croatian Catholics and Bosnian Muslims.  And, finally, don't forget Northern Ireland, where Protestants and Catholics keep their conflict alive, and the old animosities between Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy continue.

The link between institutionalized religion and violence is not surprising.  Organized religion is the only entity outside of the state that can give moral sanction to economically instigated violence.  The absolute language of religion makes absolute claims on believers.  Every religious tradition is filled with symbols of violence from the execution device that many Christians wear to the sword of Muslims.

There has always been a close relationship between religion, economics and politics.  At times of instability, leaders exploit the power of religious language for political ends.  For example, Europe's historical Wars of Religion are mistitled.  They had very little to do with religious differences but with princes and kings struggling to gain control over their own and other territories.  Religion has been used to justify colonialism, slavery, and apartheid.  Leaders of the United States often use religious language at times of warfare when they denounce the enemy as evil and invoke God as taking sides in the fight; thus we have a call to arms with religious overtones, and a sense of selfless community.