Anti-Terrorism, a Message of Postulation

War has been ever present throughout most all of human history. The first pantheons of human religion typically contained some god of war, or at least a god with a strong hand in war, if not more than one. It has for so long been matter-of-fact that only just recently has war come under attack as unnecessary for human development. What changed was not just our nature, but our technology. (Sociologist James Henslin writes in his textbook Sociology, that human culture is directly based off the society's available technology.) With the globalization of the world, our interconnected network of world-wide communication via the internet, and enough physical means to develop the ideologies of tolerance and acceptance, we have had the exposure needed to realize that most humans are alike. Prejudice and racism and all their facets and dogma (historically common sources of justification for wars against other countries) have, in at least the first world and much, much of the third world, become wide spread symbols of evil. We can no longer use a people's nationality as a sole justification for war, many of us at least, as racism still prevails in all countries to such extent, America by no means an exception. The insightful of humans need an ethical justification, true reason, one clear to a reasonable being; as it should be.

The side effects of such a shift in culture have become evident by a few things: the UN and international community uses several peaceful means to deter acts of war, the most common of which is economic sanctioning, hence you don't see too much "Made in North Korea" at the store, although it's still there. Also, after the World Wars, war has never looked too pretty. There was a day where heroes, in the age of sword and bow, would go out, get beat up, and have a decent chance of suffering only survivable wounds, from which they could heal and go out again. When we added the additive of high powered explosives and poisonous chemical agents, and guns that can kill hundreds of men before running out of ammo... Well, I need not cite the world's sufferings from this era.

We realize war is bad. But we, humans, are far from eliminating it, in a sense at least.

Money is the World's Largest Religion

Human beings study several sciences: physics, mathematics, biology, ethics, and of course economics. When we look at an object in physics, one of the more 'real' sciences you could say, depending on the perspective in question, we can determine and assign it several properties: things like mass, height, length, inertia, density. However, in recent years, we've added a property to that list: cost. Cost is commonly the first aspect we look at, especially nowadays in our state of economy. But what is it? To answer that we must ask what is currency.

A friend of mine named Shawn has more money than most people I know, so when he told me what money was, it surprised me coming from someone who had so much of it. He told me, money is a promise. It's a promise that because you gave me some item or service, someone else in a similar society will give you an item or service of equal value. But then what is value? It might be measurable, but how so? We can measure weight, and dimensions, and the like, without question. But value is something different. It's a psychological phenomenon, a process in the brain in which the human undergoes some equation to calculate how much currency the asset in question is worth. It's not a real thing, it's an imaginary game. However, the ritual of applying value to assets has become so widespread, along with the trade of, accumulation, or at least obsession over currency, it reaches every corner of the planet. It's a mental process which we use to justify actions such as sacrifice and war and the joining of labor systems which consume our health and life, all for the dollar. Money is truly a religion is every aspect.