Thank you Mark for responding to my thought piece. I will take your words to heart. Matthew Fox is just one of many writers who delves into the concept of "original sin" and the idea that humanity is inherently imperfect, impure or outright evil. Two other books that I've read recently include Gully and Mulholland's "If Grace is True" and "If God is Love". I agree with you that not all of Christianity is characterized by coercion. This was an over-generalization on my part that I regret. To answer your question... I do not know why humankind is responsible for so much "bad" in this world, any more than I know why humankind is responsible for so much "good". I guess my central point is that there is no reason to assume that humankind is intrinsically bad or good. Personally, I think it is an irrelevant argument. Humankind is simply the way it is... a combination of good and bad. Plus, I do not pretend to know the mind of "God". I would guess that if "God" is perfect and good, then he/she/it must have a purpose for everything in Creation, and that ultimately the purpose must be for good. Our identification of certain people and events being "bad" is based on our limited perspective, I think. In other words, it is all an illusion.

btw, there's a new law that passed here in Honduras, you can't smoke near non smokers or in public places out in the open.

Where do I begin?

Mr. Rosenzweig, whose establishment and entrepreneurial spirit I lavished with praise several years ago, is splitting hair and indulging in tricky talk strategy -- in this case the artful dodging or denial of verifiable assertions while conceding facts too blatant to ignore.

The purpose of my article was to review a book that forcefully articulates realities that cannot be adequately detailed within the confines of a magazine column. It is up to readers to decide whether my observations match those outlined in this very serious scholarly work. That's one.

Two, Mr. Rosenzweig incorrectly and somehow patronizingly assumes that a member of an indigenous tribe, in this case a Maya-Chorti, cannot elegantly articulate the sentiments that I attribute to him. While it is true that I took the liberty to freely translate from Spanish and embellish in English what I found to be a touching and eloquent statement, I neither changed nor distorted his words.

Three, the Maya-Chorti I quote -- and whose name shall remain unuttered for reasons that Mr. Rosenzweig, a long-time resident of Honduras, should understand, is an old friend, a respected tribal counselor and activist who earned a PhD. and does not at this time reside in any of the outlying communities surrounding Copan Ruinas.

Four, while I endorse it -- and the book argues it in far greater and compelling detail, the statement that "tourists help to contribute in some way to human rights abuses," is not mine but the author's. I will simply say that wide-eyed backpackers and uninformed tourists thrilling for “adventure” unwittingly aid and abet undemocratic states -- of which Honduras is notoriously one – by spending money that is first filtered by tourism concerns before it ever trickles down to the people who need it most.

Five, anyone reading my article without prejudice or preconceived notion will note that the catalyst of this short essay is a famous TV travel personality who, unwisely and for reasons that can only be considered suspect, paints shimmering portraits of travel destinations that are less than idyllic and often either unhygienic or downright dangerous, or both.

Last, my frustration and displeasure was never meant to be aimed at legitimate businesses, whatever sector they may operate in, or to impugn the integrity of savvy, imaginative, hard-working businessmen, least of all Mr. Rosenzweig, whose lovely bed-and-breakfast I’ve patronized in the past.

I’m surprised and somewhat disappointed that he has resorted to impugning both my integrity as a journalist and my motives. But this is not the first time that the messenger is pilloried for the unpalatable message he delivers.

I stand by my article.

Trapdoor spiders are formidable and cunning predators. They lie in wait, the tip of their fangs glistening with venom, poised to strike at anything that moves.

Some readers (and writers) remind me of that abominable arachnid. Shielded by anonymity (or empowered by their byline), they pounce on anything that conflicts with their vision of reality. They hold their own doctrinaire court of public opinion. They orate with professorial smugness. When exasperated, they resort to ad hominem attacks. They are the dissenters, the posse of “No.” They disagree with everything.

If they only knew how I thrive on their pontifications.

Let’s take a break from the “gloom and doom” of previous columns, and reflect on three timely topics — the Arizona immigration law, patriotism and democracy. I expect to be promptly ambushed.

The Arizona law takes “states’ rights” to unconstitutional extremes. It is racist and likely to be reversed. This should not prevent cops from engaging in racial profiling; they’ve been doing that anyway. I don’t think blue-eyed Scandinavians — even if they’re here illegally — or green-eyed Jews sporting a Hollywood tan have anything to fear.

The history of capitalism is rife with xenophobic and racist convulsions, especially in times of economic crisis. “Nationalists” always blame minorities for the woes that afflict a nation.

Early immigrants — Irish, Italian and Jewish — were conveniently singled out and paid the high price of “assimilation.” Now, it’s the turn of America’s Spanish-speaking people to suffer the ire of white America for such self-inflicted financial calamities as two long, illegal, immoral, unwinnable wars; corruption in high places; and the scandalous exoneration of felonious lending institutions. All this while the bankers and money lenders — the true architects of the global crisis — continue to defraud the public.

By Republican decree, and with the consent of 70 percent of its inhabitants, Arizona was turned into the first police state, when Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB1070 into law. The statute criminalizes some 460,000 undocumented residents. It allows the police to use racial profiling to detain anyone they deem “reasonably suspicions.”

It also turns Arizona into the first laboratory for the new political and socioeconomic order that globalizers are intent on spreading.

Arizona is bankrupt, with a budget deficit of almost $3 billion, and an unemployment index of about 20 percent. State parks are closed, several government buildings are for sale and businesses are teetering on the brink of insolvency.

With the new law, lauded by neo-Nazi organizations and the 540 white supremacist “militias,” houses are being emptied and immigrants, both undocumented and legal, embark on a new exodus for fear of police persecution and racial discrimination. Bill Davis, an organizer of local militias, is recruiting war veterans with “experience” in killing “to hunt illegals.”

A third of Arizona’s population is Hispanic, many of them immigrants who produce $44 billion in revenue, of which $29 billion is generated by 280,000 full-time and 80,000 part-time undocumented workers, who pay $1.5 billion in taxes. Should this depraved piece of legislation endure, Arizona will become a phantom state.

For the record, I acknowledge and salute America’s virtues. America gave me more than I had the right to expect; perhaps more than I deserved. But that shouldn’t prevent me from deploring the mythical image it has of itself, censuring its foreign policy and vilifying the hypocrisy of its Puritanical facade, the larceny of its plutocratic elite and the rapacious nature of the kleptocracy.

Democracy’s greatest weakness is that it tolerates the existence of undemocratic, albeit, evil doctrines espoused by men who would promptly deny others the very rights that democracy grants them. These are the same men behind the Arizona law, the chauvinists who disfigure the very essence of America under the pretext that the Constitution grants them these democratic rights. They are to be feared more than pitied or ridiculed.

It is true that a large majority of priests are not engaged in ritual child buggering. Most are hard at work cramming people's heads with hocus-pocus while helping replenish the Vatican's overflowing coffers with the hard-earned wages and tithes the poor so selflessly part with.

It is obvious Cardinal Rodríguez is more concerned with declining donations than with the tsunami-like sex scandal and the lives that ordained perverts have ruined.

On the contrary, I am more than willing to read your book and have no doubt your experience and viewpoint is more than fair. My experiences are no doubt different than yours, but I recognize that two honest people can see the world differently, yet respectfully. I hope you would agree.

Unless you simultaneously publish, convict, and try those operatives working for the old Soviet Union, Cuba, & Nicaragua alongside those who worked for the CIA, then the picture given is not adequate for a historical view of the tragic events of the Cold War in Central America. Honduras is not the only country that experienced these death squads, nor is it true the leftists were the only targets of counterinsurgency in Central America. In Nicaragua the leftist government was quite vicious in its own right perpetrating ruthless crimes against its own people. Counterinsurgency/insurgency was the weapon of choice on both the American and the Soviet side throughout Latin America and the world from very early in the world war known to history as "Cold".

If, as your article implies, we should only concern ourselves with the crimes of the right vs. the left, one questions your skewed views as playing into the hands of the leftists, if not seeking to aid their cause directly. I do not advocate for the rightists, merely a complete analysis of the events that shows the wider context.

“God”: a Pathway to Discord
I come from a culture where “God” was never mentioned—except as a token exclamation—and death or the hereafter did not dominate conversations, either in a religious or ontological context. I was never given a religious education (nor deprived of such) and the notion of an invisible, omnipotent creator/arbiter/destroyer seemed to me ludicrous even as a child.
I think, therefore I doubt.
I began to doubt when I awoke from a blinding sleep and shed the last vestiges of forbearance for senseless beliefs. Nine-tenths of my family had perished in Hitler’s gas chambers and the “inscrutability of God’s designs,” at best an offensive rationale, had since become intolerable.
I rejected the notion that I was born sullied by some “primal offense,” that pain ennobles the soul and that sentient beings need to be ruled by an arbitrary system of faith-based values and protocols.
In religion’s ostensible respectability, I discovered not a path to enlightenment but an instrument of deceit and emotional enslavement.
The transformation from fence-straddler to mutineer was gradual, filled with misgivings. At first, I found religion’s mystique inscrutable. I had meandered through its occluded allegories and bizarre canons like an explorer in a strange, uncharted land. I had glimpsed the very faint light that religion claims to shed but found only vast and gloomy shadows. It is in the shadows that my senses, now accustomed to the darkness, caught sight of a glow, a radiant luminosity that rinsed my pupils free of the gritty debris of credulity. I now understood that blind faith (not truth), prejudice and fear (not common sense) threaten humankind and consign it to bondage.
Like others before me, I had absent-mindedly tolerated sundry propositions and viewpoints along the way, some of which I even peddled, parrot-like, out of stupidity or intellectual sloth, not for the intrinsic virtues with which they were purportedly endowed.
Assembly-line rearing, fashionable in the days of my youth, had instilled a value system that seemed strange if not utterly without merit. I had been coached by otherwise doting parents to defer to authority with robot-like reverence: Applaud politely but do not innovate. Honor your elders. Venerate your teachers. Salute your superiors. Obey the boss. Comply with representatives of the public order. In short, I was to idolize or at least yield to all species of adults of dubious pedigree who had by now forgotten what it feels like to look at a very menacing world from three feet off the ground.
In school, I had been programmed by coldhearted teachers to smile or fight back the tears, to subdue, sometimes to smother very raw feelings under the pretext that such perfunctory bearing is what society expects of a good little boy and later, of a mensch. Precocious and sly, I knew that I was not and could never be a good little boy. Nor did I aspire to menschhood, a status not clearly defined or imagined at the time. But I understood that pretending to be what others anticipate [feigning religion?] can bring on small rewards or, at the very least, shield one from censure, reprimand or retribution -- all of which I eventually incurred when I tired of pretending and transitioned at last from conciliation and irresolution to resolve and defiance.
As this internal debate took place, I acknowledged the nobility of the “Golden Rule” – the Ethic of Reciprocity -- present in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (but probably of more ancient Buddhist provenance) yet I was witness to man’s inclination to ignore it, even violate it, in the name of Yahweh, Theos and Allah.
I read from Hillel the Elder, the 1st century BCE rabbi who summed up the Torah with the expression “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.” I then read Luke (6:31), which teaches, “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” Last, I turned to the Koran’s lofty counsel, “No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.”
But “others,” “neighbor,” and “brother,” I understood, have a parochial meaning that, history has shown, signifies “those of our own kind -- us, not them.” This travesty of an otherwise over-hyped “guiding light” was placed under the unfailing microscope of distinguished journalist Christiane Amanpour. First aired and since rebroadcast on CNN, the three-part “God’s Warriors: The Clash Between Piety and Politics,” offers a disturbing rendering of the three major religions’ susceptibility to intolerance in the service of deity and of their pugnacious penetration of the body politic.
Indeed, carried to its demented extremes, religion is a dangerous aberration that renders men insane. Only religious delirium could inspire a Muslim father to plot the “honor killing” of his own daughter, or to bomb a disco filled with Jewish youths. Only numinous rapture could lead a self-styled Christian to murder doctors performing legal abortions. Only a Jewish zealot could torch cars on the Sabbath, assault members of a peaceful Gay Pride parade and threaten “bloodshed” if the Jerusalem police chief allowed the parade to proceed.
This is the bare face of religion, I concluded. This is how organized religion, if allowed, will transform society into a citadel of intolerance and an incubator for hatred and persecution. The record shows that the prime target of sectarian hatred is “heretics,” a one-size-fits-all label that describes those who hold different beliefs than one’s own, or, like me, who grant themselves the inalienable right to hold none. Within that conflict lays an unresolved tension between the command to love one’s enemies and the equally strong injunction to reject any alien or divergent dogma.
In the final analysis, neither Jew, nor Christian or Muslim knows which of the two commands to follow at any given time. By attacking “heretics” as tools of Satan, religious fanatics seize the rhetorical high ground and shift the focus from loving one’s enemies to the escapist option of waging war against an imaginary source of iniquity. This was the preeminent rationale for the Crusades; the St. Bartholomew massacre; the Inquisition; the 30-Years War; the centuries-old strife in Northern Ireland; the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts; the Hutu-Tutsi reciprocal slaughter; the Hindu-Moslem conflict in India and Kashmir; the bloodbath in Sudan and the current Shia-Sunni carnage.
Later, as my peripheral vision improved and my depth perception deepened, I began to ask questions:
o Why are we susceptible to pain and defenseless against the fury of disasters – natural and manmade -- that, religion insists, are wrought against us "for mysterious reasons" by some capricious supernatural force?
o Who is this "maker" who inflicts (or tolerates) atrocities for "the good that comes from them"? What cunning and irreducible absolute orchestrates without apparent aim -- or turns a blind eye to -- the paroxysms that convulse his realm?
o What “intelligent designer” remains stone-silent while the sobs of his creation are never heard?
o What “ineffable” entity is this, whose ear is inattentive and whose breast is unfaithful to the throngs who call on him and seek his succor?
o What cruel despot decrees that his subjects will speak words not their own, that they will blindly obey the injunctions of his self-anointed envoys, tremble at their threats and admonitions, mouth off supplications and jeremiads and recite guilt-ridden prayers of indebtedness and veneration, all repeated ad nauseum, day after day, to a God who never shows his face, never bares his heart, never sheds a tear, never says he's sorry, a God who grants life and, with it, the fear of death?
The questions, I realized, were in fact declaratory statements conjugated in the interrogative. And crypto-agnosticism turned into atheism.
Sunnis and Shi'a are killing each other. Palestinians threaten yet another intifada over public works projects at a site “holy” to both Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem (where ultra-Orthodox Judaism is being Talibanized). Calls for an Islamic reformation, in the belief that it will reduce, if not eliminate, extremism and violence, ignores the Christian reformation, which was followed not by peace, but by decades of sectarian warfare between Catholics and Protestants. Imagine what would have happened if one or both sides had possessed nuclear weapons. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which stated that monarchs have the God-given right to manipulate their subjects’ destiny -- and dictate their religion -- [“One faith, one law, one king”] would have been a peace over a barren, radioactive landscape.
This I believe: Religion is divisive, repressive, irrational and detrimental to the pursuit of harmony among men. It belongs, if at all, in houses of worship and at home. It has no place in my bedroom, city hall, schools, Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House, much less in the crafting of a national psyche.
The sectarian hatreds that convulse the planet (and the paroxysms of militant religiosity that now grip America) aptly confirm religion’s toxic character.
As for the Jew named Jesus’ capacity to love, was it not he who angrily said, “But those mine enemies which would not that I reign over them, bring hither and slay before me.” (Luke, 19:27). So much for empathy and compassion.
Karl Marx was right: religion is the opiate of the people. But unlike opium, which puts users in a state of blissful lethargy, religion inflames passions and brings the worst in man.

In defending the indefensible, Antonio di Iorio runs the gamut of tricky talk strategies. He indulges simultaneously and often contradictorily in distinctions without a difference, hidden assumptions, slippery slope arguments, arguments from ignorance and artful equivocations His assertion that a chronically inept and admittedly economically unstable nation is incapable of barbarism is specious in the extreme. His logic is reminiscent of the obscene excuse given me by Roberto Reina’s Vice President Guadalupe Jerezano when I asked her why minors are incarcerated with adult felons. “Honduras is poor,” said the bejeweled Jerezano as she sipped champagne. “We don’t have the resources to build separate facilities….”

It may surprise my respected colleague to learn that, as we speak minors continue to be locked up with hardened adult criminals in Honduras’ stinking dungeon-like prisons; that respected international organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, the International Center for Justice and Law and the Court in The Hague -- as well as a significant number of world governments (including the US) -- call Honduras “the most violent and corrupt nation in Central America”; that street children, maverick journalists, social gadflies and other “undesirables” are regularly purged by agents of the state; and that Honduras continues to be ruled by old-monied dynasties and cliques of nouveaux-riches upstarts who live in Babylonian splendor while the masses struggle to survive.

Mr. Di Iorio may also be suffering from a selective memory when he brazenly declares that “there has never been anyone in the history of Honduras who better symbolizes inept rule than [Manuel] Zelaya.” He may have forgotten the lackluster (and in some cases larcenous and scandal-ridden) administrations of Presidents Reina, Flores and Maduro

Last, his claim that violence in Honduras is random and episodic is absurd and flies in the face of verifiable facts – the daily carnage that the nation’s four dailies flaunt on their front pages with obscene zest. High rates of crime may not always be the result of “conspiracies” but they are symptomatic of a dysfunctional society in which a super-rich and apathetic elite bides its time while pilfering the national coffers.

I told people last year (2009) that the elections in November were a victory for freedom, but that the corrupt international narco-socialist mafia that tried to overthrow the Republic of Honduras with Zelaya's Coup d'Etat and fraudulent referendum, would not stop.

Hondurans are cheering the forces behind the scenes that are pushing back against the shadowy, serpentine forces that want full capitulation to the plan to subjugate them to Castro-Chavez "socialist" slavery.

They realize that socialism is a Trojan horse full of poverty, misery, oppression, and the role of vassals to the new plutocrats. They know that it is the worst thing tha tcould happen to the poor. What irony that the new opiate cocaine is used to finance the push for this opiate of the masses..

--trutherator