Bookraft

There is an excellent article on Islamic Moderates (or more precisely the lack of the voice of) by A Ali at the New York Times. But the same could be said of Christian voices in the past 12-15 years on the North American political scene. Moderation has certainly not been the paradigm here with the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Elmer Gantry (just seeing if you are on the right path here).

But more than ever before a more fundamental controversy that is spreading worldwide. Call it Moral Populism. As ever larger segments of the World's population can a)see clearly the disparity in wealth, income, and well being and see their opportunity to attain even a fraction of that welfare being thwarted by internal and external agents . And don't dismiss North America where in the US 1% of the population earns 21.2% of all Disposable Income => "The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980." And yet b)their whole lives are being influenced by external economic and technical forces such that their indigenous social, moral and religious foundations are being subtly and/or radically changed in small and large ways.

So to this observer, Progress is now perceived as a decidedly mixed blessing by significant fractions of the world population. And so they are a)resorting to the traditional institution of moral and social distress - their religion and b)they are tolerating if not demanding greater stridency from those institutions.

Now dexterous Thinktanks say these are sinister populist class-warfare notions, so shame on me. Shame on those Thinktanks as a)1% of the US population will surely find themselves getting richer this year and over the next few years at the expense of just about everybody else while at the same time, b) major economic fluctuations and environmental problems fester and get worse. Yes indeed, I am saying that Terrorists Sympathizers and Christian Righteous are more closely aligned in moral indignation than one would nominally think.