Without a doubt this fellow from the city of Nazareth in an area known as Galilee has provided us with much to think about. Although the man is regarded to be a prophet by each and every one of the great religions of the world, we appear to be on the verge of killing each other for no other reason than our inability to agree on who this man is, what he stood for, and how it is that he would like for us to conduct our lives!

Quite obviously, just as yours, my first concern has always been that of trying to figure out just exactly who Jesus is.

And, believe me, if I knew for sure, I would tell you, but like so many who have gone before, I am left with questions.

Is Jesus Christ the Son of God … a God of judgment and wrath or one of mercy and forgiveness?

What was Jesus' mission, to show us how to live a good life and/or to save us from eternal damnation?

Did he die only to rise from the grave?

Is Jesus the one and only Savior of the world, the one in whom every human being must believe or spend an eternity of agonizing pain in the fiery flames of Hell?

Alas, even though I have spent at least five decades trying to figure out who this man is, I am sorry to report that I am yet confused ... but, not to give up, I plan to spend the remaining years of my life interrogating God, all in order to better understand who Jesus is.

On the other hand, there seems to be little question as to what Jesus taught. In order to clear away the vast amount of deadwood, the utter complexity of the Jewish faith, Jesus reduced religion to its most essential elements, that we love God, our neighbor, as well as that of our enemy.

Assuming that this was Jesus' mission on Earth, to show us how to live such a life, allow me to share with you what such means to me within the context of the world in which we live.

Now, within the context of those with whom I have lived my life, I have found the teachings of Jesus to be my best guide. I have discovered that when I chose to violate such teaching by treating others in an unkind manner, nothing but harm has come to me. Believe me, it has been so terribly easy for me to love those of my friends, but so horribly difficult to learn how to forgive those who have harmed me. But in aging, I am convinced that love is a far better thing than hate.

As I look back upon my life, often have I deplored that which I have done while angry, but never once have I regretted having made amends, having forgiven, having made an effort to love my enemy.

But what about the church, Christians who claim to know the truth of God, those who claim to know everything about this man they call the Son of God, those who claim to know exactly how Jesus would deal with the critical issues of our day; homosexuality, capital punishment, abortion, cloning, poverty, and war?

However, as a psychologist, I am quite sure that such pronouncements are often nothing more than rather well rehearsed attempts to justify, that is, to rationalize, the apparent correctness of their views, unconscious maneuvers, permitting them to believe that God has spoken, revealed his truth, to them.

One might wish that church doctrine was, in fact, a spiritual matter, but alas such may be nothing more than canonical attempts to appease the appetite of those who happen to pay the bills of the church.

Add to this the rather mean spirited history of the church (the Spanish Inquisition, the rape of the Indian culture during the westward expansion, the brutalization of black slaves, the New England torture of witches, and the church's longstanding support of America's military-industrial complex) and you have a misguided church that apparently has very little to offer the world.

As James Hillman wrote in his book, A Terrible Love of War: "Western Christianity's god comes front and center when war is in the air. War brings its god to life." Consequently, I can no longer, in good conscience, claim to be a Christian. Rather, I have chosen to accept the teachings of Jesus as well as those of other religions that tend to support the categorical imperative of Jesus' command that we love God, our neighbor, and that of our enemy.

And then there is the mess of our own country (USA) ... I have often wondered how Jesus might feel about this so-called "land of the free."

However, since we will likely never know, the best I can do is to suggest what appears to have taken hold of the American mind.

The verdict: sex, money, an avaricious appetite to acquire more and more things, power, prestige, a jingoistic attachment to that of "the fatherland," and civil religion, and, in all probability, in that particular order.

Added to this there is the undeniable reality of our country's longstanding desire to dominate the world, and all of such supported by a people who have, with no fight whatsoever, allowed themselves to have been brainwashed into believing that our country has been assigned the divine responsibility of carrying out the righteous will of God.

All of such leading to a ridiculously wicked claim that our country can do no wrong!

And finally ... this thing about war. There can be no misunderstanding that Jesus' mandate to love is uncompromisingly opposed to the mass slaughter that defines the character of war. However, because so many have successfully distorted the teachings of Jesus, our country has been allowed to launch a decades-long campaign of death and destruction formulated to destroy all who refuse to play "the game" according to our rules (vis-a-vis the upcoming invasion of Iran).

As William Blum in his book, 'Killing Hope,' so tellingly describes, "It's not that [the leaders of our nation] take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't [seem to care] ... as long as death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ... they just don't [seem to care]."

As a result of such actions millions of people have been killed, the rest having been condemned to a life of poverty, misery and despair. And of course, all of such through the rather loosely coordinated efforts of the government, the corporate community, mass media, the church, and that of our own public schools who have collectively decided that it would be in our best interests if we, the people, remained uniformly uninformed in regards to the ugly realities of our nation's rather sordid past.

Accordingly, I must admit that I am terribly ashamed to have become associated with so much of what so many Americans have claimed to be so very proud.

And I am convinced that if our country is to once again become a beacon of light for the rest of the world to see, a strong and resilient democracy capable of standing up for that which is right and good, then the citizenry of our nation must reverse what has become a slow yet determined decline into a morass of ignorance and sloth, an abject unwillingness to face the fact that our country is under attack (not from without, but rather from within) by that of a rising tide of fascism threatening to consume everything that we, as a nation, once held dear, a neoconservative campaign eerily similar to that which occurred in Germany as Adolph Hitler rose to power.

In the meantime, however, I ask but one thing ... that God bestow upon us the wisdom to realize that time may be short, and that if we are to reclaim our nation, we have no choice but to recognize our constitutional right, our responsibility, and most importantly our duty...

...to throw aside, even to abolish, any body politic that might threaten to destroy a government created of the people, by the people, and...

Thank God for every one of the people of our country, the United States of America.

Doug Soderstrom, Ph.D.
DougSod@wcjc.edu
Wharton County Junior College

The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans-members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen-rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq.

A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell's presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his "evidence": satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled "Irrefutable" and declared that after Powell's talk "it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."

It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don't know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil," but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson-so often characterized in our history books as an "idealist"-lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target."

Everyone lied about Vietnam-Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991-hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq's taking of
Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil?

A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was "we the people" who established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.

Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn't talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like "national interest," "national security," and "national defense" as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that-not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor-is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there-the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be "checks and balances"-do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

The deeply ingrained belief-no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general-that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to "pledge allegiance" (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with "liberty and justice for all."

And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner," announcing that we are "the land of the free and the home of the brave." There is also the unofficial national anthem "God Bless America," and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation-just 5 percent of the world's population-for his or her blessing.

If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values-democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise-to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.

It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this "the American century," saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was "the calling of our time." Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: "The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities."

What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison-more than two million.

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice.

In a further twist, detectives were investigating reports that the mystery killer left messages in orange spray paint around the neighbourhood. The steps of one house two doors away had been spray painted. Police kept reporters away, however, and what was written could not be confirmed.

The six partygoers killed were all in their teens or twenties. Two other people were taken to hospital with gunshot wounds, one of them in a life-threatening condition. The Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske said: 'It's one of the largest crime scenes the city has ever had.'

William Lowe, 59, who lives across the street from the party, said he heard six shots fired shortly after his alarm went off at 7am. He looked through a peephole of his front door to see people scattering from the home.

Police found four people dead in various rooms and another on the porch. Sergeant Deanna Nollette said 15 other people at the house witnessed the shooting. The suspected gunman appeared to have left the party, then returned and started firing.

Police said they did not know if drugs or alcohol were a factor, but Nollette added that several of the occupants had come from another party

"It's a total shock," said Regina Gray, manager of Town & Country Apartments, where the Huff brothers lived. "He and his twin brother are the kindest, sweetest, gentlest people."

It was a sharp contrast to the man police spokesman Sean Whitcomb described Sunday as "extremely dangerous" who "approached the house shooting and didn't stop shooting."

Police say the victims met Huff, 28, at a rave called "Better Off Undead" Friday night and invited him back to an after-party at their rental home on Capitol Hill.

Some 500 people attended the rave - parties that attract young people to dance to thumping, bass-laden electronic music. People often dress up in Halloween-like outfits and paint their faces.

Huff left the after-party at about 7 a.m. and returned wearing bandoliers of ammunition and carrying a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun and a handgun. He fired on the 30 young partygoers gathered in the house before walking out and killing himself when confronted by a police officer.

Police also found an assault rifle, multiple "banana clips" carrying 30 bullets each, a machete and several hundred more rounds of ammunition in Huff's pickup truck. He said it was fortunate there weren't more victims.

Whitcomb said police were still working on a motive.

"This would have been so far out of character," said Jim Pickett, the assistant manager of the Town & Country Apartments.

Pickett described the brothers as "very polite. Very respectful. 'Yessir. Yes ma'am. Can I help ya. How am I doing today?' ... You don't find two boys as respectful as these two always were."

The brothers moved into the third-floor apartment 4 years ago after leaving their family home in Whitefish, Mont., apartment managers said. Police officials say Huff was commonly known as Kyle.

Pickett said he never saw either of the brothers with weapons, but he said he did see police carry three rifles out of the apartment after they searched it Saturday.

Pickett said he saw Huff's brother as police were conducting the search.

"He gave a look to me like 'I don't know what's going on,"' Pickett said.

Lt. Dave Leib, of the Flathead County sheriff's office in Montana, confirmed Huff's identity Sunday afternoon. He informed Huff's mother Sunday afternoon that her son was dead and was a suspect in the shootings.

Seattle officials didn't release the gunman's identity Sunday, saying only the medical examiner could give an official confirmation on Monday.

Leib said Huff was charged with felony criminal mischief in 2000 after shooting a statue of a moose with a shotgun at an art exhibit in Whitefish.

Pickett described the brothers as private and good tenants. One of the brothers played drums, but was very careful not to disturb neighbors.

"He was really getting pretty good. He would practice at a respectful hour between 4 and 6 and would stop at 6," Pickett said.

Kyle Huff delivered pizzas in the area and did odd jobs, Gray said. She added that he would go home to Montana to do some work for his mother from time to time.

Authorities have not released the victim's identities, but relatives and friends of three victims, Jason Travers, 32, Jeremy Martin, 26, and Christopher Williamson, 21, confirmed that they were among the dead.

Several ravers gathered at a makeshift memorial near the crime scene Sunday morning, including Travis Webb, an area rave promoter who attended the rave that preceded the fatal party.

Webb said he and other ravers are fearful that officials would use the shooting as an excuse to shut down the parties. Police said alcohol and marijuana were found at the murder scene, but they had not linked them to the crime.

"It's almost a double punishment," Webb said. "You lose six people that are so close, and then you might lose the community that brought you all together in the first place."

Mr Blair staunchly defended his policy on Iraq - which Australia's conservative PM John Howard supported - saying: "If the going gets tough, we tough it out."

And he repeated his call for a global struggle of ideas and values against the worldwide threat of Islamic terrorism, stressing the importance of international alliances. He also used the speech to signal a fresh bid to revive the Middle East peace process after the Israeli elections on April 9 - an issue he is expected to tackle in America next month.

"The reality is that none of the problems that press in on us can be resolved or even contemplated without them.

"Our task is to ensure that with them we do not limit the agenda to security. If our security lies in our values, and our values are about justice and fairness as well as freedom from fear, then the agenda must be more than security and the alliance include more than America."

He added: "Once the Israeli election has taken place, we must redouble our efforts to find a way to the only solution that works - a secure state of Israel and a viable, independent Palestinian state."

Mr Blair again stressed his belief that democracy and human rights should not be assigned as western values, saying: "To win we have to win the battle of valued as much as arms, we have to show these are not western still less American or Anglo-Saxon values, but values in the common ownership of humanity, universal values that should be the right of the global citizen - this is the challenge.

"Ranged against us are the people who hate us, but beyond them are many more who don't hate us but question our motives, our good faith, our even-handedness, who could support our values but believe we support them selectively.

"These are the people we have to persuade.

"They have to know this is about justice and fairness as well as security and prosperity. And in truth, there is no prosperity without security and no security without justice.

"That is the consequence of an interconnected world - that is why we cannot say we are an open society and close our markets to the trade justice the poorest of the world demand."

On Iraq, Mr Blair told the parliament: "I know the Iraq war split this nation as it did mine, and I have never disrespected those who disagreed with me over it."

But he warned: "We must not hesitate in the face of a battle utterly decisive in whether the values we believe in triumph or fail.

"If the going is tough, we tough it out. This is not a time to walk away. This is a time for the courage to see it through."

Before addressing the parliament, Mr Blair was welcomed to the Australian capital with a 19-gun salute and inspected a guard of honour outside the legislature.

Later, the prime minister, accompanied by Mr Howard, was going on to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier and visit an exhibition commemorating the Australian contribution to the world wars.

Tomorrow he will have official talks with Mr Howard, before the two host a joint press conference.

Experiments in northern Ontario have shown that exposure to these waste drugs has led to the feminization of male fish, delayed reproduction in female fish and damage to kidneys and livers of both sexes, the report said.

Independent studies by the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States and by environmental bodies in England have turned up similar evidence.

Miller said pharmaceuticals are getting into drinking water in several ways. Unused drugs are thrown into domestic garbage, which end up in landfill sites and eventually into the groundwater.

Drugs are taken orally and flushed down toilets as human excrement. And unused drugs are washed down the sink or flushed down the toilet directly into domestic sewers.

Many drugs pass right through the sewage and water treatment plants, back into the drinking water.

"Sewage treatment plants aren't designed to remove them," Miller said.