But your posts did make me angry about one last thing that I'm going to comment about, welcome or not.
You write: "...the Japanese tried to sue for peace through the good offices of the Vatican and, in response, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb upon Nagasaki--the seat of Japanese Catholicism? Now that's what I call power..."
Oh for heaven's sake.
How typically modern. How typically Western. A discussion of religion is in progress, and people kneel down to the guy with the biggest bomb. As if the "power" of Patton is comparable to the "power" of Christ.
Even silly pagans have gotten beyond this kind of thinking. Remember:
VADER"Don't be too proud of this
technological terror you've
constructed. The ability to
destroy a planet is insignificant
next to the power of the Force."
In its day, the Roman Empire dominated the known world. They were the only super power there. Yet just ten generations from the Cross (and with no political mechanisms of any kind behind it) Christianity had so threatened that "technological terror" that Constantine had to pretend to convert so that the Empire could at least attempt to get ahead of it and at least manage the Empire's Fall in the face of the real "force" that was sweeping across the world...
[laughs] Remember, at the end of "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" -- the apes had come to worship The Bomb, too...
Okay, I've had my say. I'll shut up now. Lost in a Roman, wilderness of pain, I'll shut up now.
Mark W.