  A god-awful long time ago a middling poet was paid a huge sum of money to create an epic that would grant the Roman Empire the kind of prestige the Greeks had earned by sacking a trading port called Troy and then singing about it in dark taverns filled with drunken men. Instead, he wrote a story of hell, paradise and lost hope. Dante's urlLink Divine Comedy is not the least bit funny, nor is it intended to be.
"Comedy" and "tragedy" were more closely linked in the Roman imagination than they are in ours, and in many cases were used interchangeably. Why bring this up today? For the same reason CNN is blathering on about the victims of 9/11. The terrorist attack against the World Trade Center was a terrible tragedy, but it was also comic.
No doubt there will be many people out there today making odd, perverse, and twisted jokes about the number of people who died, the nihilistic and narcissistic American response, the ego-centric responses of the Arabic world, and of course, the draconian increase in security measures worldwide that will, in the end, do little or nothing to prevent the next dramatic act of terrorism. As a species it seems we will never learn that you cannot stop someone so intent on reaching their goals their own life means nothing to them.
Rather than stopping the terrorists, we need to focus our energies on developing social, cultural, and political systems with greater sensitivity to the needs of the underpriviledged, the lost, the abandoned, the desperate, and the insane. Until we create a world where all people have the same opportunities for self-expression regardless of whether or not we agree with them, we will continue to have men and women so desperate on voicing their anger and dissatisfaction with prevailing social conditions that they have no choice but to resort to guns, bombs, and airplanes used as guided missles.
The more you disagree with someone, the more important it is to listen carefully to what they have to say and then take the time to seriously consider their opinion. Right and wrong are never the issue. The real issue is how deeply we value one another's feelings, perceptions, and realities. The only way to prevent another 9/11 is to give the terrorists nothing to be angry about. As an aside: Many years ago I was a devout Christian.
I evangelized among prostitutes, fed the homeless, visited prisons, bought food for hitchikers, and so on. I lived out the Christian life to the best of my ability. In all that time, my worst critics were other Christians. I was accused of paying prostitutes for sex (to this day I've never had sex with one, let alone paid for it), preferring the company of street people to "decent law-abiding folk" (absolutely! still do! ), and supporting the lifestyles of society's outcasts by catering to their needs rather than pounding them over the head with my Bible.
Finally, I got fed-up. I drifted away from Christianity, and eventually abandoned it altogether. Now I have no firm religious beliefs of any kind. If gods and demons exist, I've seen little evidence of it outside the hearts and minds of the human species. The intolerance of my fellow Christians drove me away from Christianity for good. I had no argument with the Bible, nor with living the Christian life, I just couldn't bear the company of self-righteous and hypocritic Christians and depite over a decade of active involvement, never really found any other kind.
Until now. urlLink Are You Tolerant is an article dealing with the issure of tolerance and modern Christianity. It is long, a tad confusing, and rather dry reading. Also, it never reaches any firm conclusion, which is something modern Christians have no tolerance for. Far too many of them want the world to be cleanly divided into two camps of good and evil, with themselves in the good camp.
This inability to come to a firm conclusion is the core weakness of the article, but it is also its greatest strength. If I had encountered more Christians who understood and applied the ideas in this article, I would probably still be attending church every Sunday, reading my Bible every night, and carrying street people to the hospital in my own car. I also wouldn't be writing this weblog, but on the other hand, neither would the world need to hear the things I have to say. 
