Excellent insight! It's like telling a teen-ager "You can't say that to me!" Some ways of fighting make us look tough but get our people killed. And McCain does not understand that.

Maybe McCain needs to be president. America is not yet sufficiently convinced of the moral poverty of this approach. I hope not. You'd think Bush would be proof enough. "Bring it on!"

Without any doubt the greatest cause of human evil is the propensity of the self-styled good to seek out and destroy evil.

Hmm, interesting comment! Do you mean good without inner goodness?

Or, perhaps, humility?

Am partly thinking of the way 'evil' is often a construct, a description from the perspective of the self styled good, and partly of the notion of evil as without substance, a privation of goodness rather, as Augustine and Aquinas. Plus, of course, the age long curse of demonising the enemy, the Other, the not-Us, the strange, the different as evil.

One of the things that magnetized me toward Jesus was his rebellious passion for "the enemy, the Other, the not-Us, the strange, the different," in the midst of a typically censorious religious culture. What a world it would make!