[Uncle Miltie]

Well, we’re talking past one another. We’ll both resist in our own ways. Good luck!

[Mrs. Don-o]

Odd thing is, I don't even know any Muslims. (Here in Upper East Tennessee, that's not so unexpected.) I once went to a Muslim rheumatologist, and he was incompetent, but I don't think it had anything to do with his religious/social/political perspective. Last one I knew, ever-so-slightly, was my son's soccer coach, and that was years ago.

What I'd really find valuable, would be knowing one or a few Muslims well enough to get their honest take on this stuff. But the chance of that happening seems vanishingly remote. I feel the lack of that.

[Mrs. Don-o]

On second thought, I'm not sure we're talking past each other: not necessarily. A point practically everybody agrees upon, is that the jihadis are operating on the basis of religious error.

They are asking what Catholics-of-a-certain-age would recognize as the first questions in the Catechism --- Who made me? Who is God? Why did God make me?--- questions which in some form occur to all rational beings as soon as they become aware of themselves.

The ardent murderous jihadis have wrong answers, which constitute transcendant motivations for which they are willing to kill and die. These transcendant motivations cannot be replaced by the consideration of earthly self-interest. ("Schools - Hospitals - Money! Whisky - Sexy - Democracy!") and their wrong answers are weirdly appealing to way too many of the billion+ Muslim people who are not active jihadis but tend to see murder-suiciders as devout and not as perverts.

How to respond to that?

• Surrender to the jihadis, or
• kill all the billion+ Muslims, or
• give them the right answers.

I am no pacifist, and I see the rightness of responding to military aggression with overwhelming force that destroys the aggressors. But underlying that hugely, as an ocean underlies a floating cork, is the metaphysical crisis: the billions of people who have garbled, fragmentary, or just plain wrong answers to the basic questions; and who, without the right answers, will fall, not into the brutal, but into the demonic.