Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s massacre of 13 men and women at Fort Hood in Texas has, like all news thunderstorms, flushed out the palmetto bugs(1). There are vectors (2) of opinion who have fixated on the fact that he was a psychiatrist, and therefore likely insane himself (Alex Jones(3)). Others have noted the strange reluctance of the media to refer to Major Hasan’s Islamic faith (Fox News, for example, citing “political correctness”). Still others have questioned whether or not Islam is compatible with occidental secular society. Those who believe that religion is dangerous per se will unquestionably make much of this tragedy in the service of their view, for they see religion much as they see smoking, as a universally evil thing responsible for untold and preventable human suffering.
The Political Correctness angle is an interesting one. On Fox News radio on Sirius yesterday (11/14/09) I heard a journalist defend her profession by noting that there was so much misinformation coming out of this incident that they had to make sure they got the facts straight before they reported them. I burst into laughter when she said it, because the media reported all sorts of other inaccuracies with great relish (the shooter had been killed, the shooter was felled by a female police officer, and the police officer who stopped the shooter was a civilian and was killed and so on). And yet I can think of at least one legitimate reason why the media might want to approach the murderer’s religion with caution: Some Americans are idiots. In Utah Frank Roque, for example, murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi shortly after the 9/11 attacks; being an idiot he did not know the difference between a Sikh and an Arab. And being an evil idiot he killed an innocent man. Shortly after the Fort Hood massacre, Tampa Marine reservist Jasen Bruce, a man so dumb he cannot even spell his name, thought a Greek Orthodox priest was a Muslim terrorist and hit him in the head with a tire iron. Then, to save his own idiot ass, he fabricated a story that the priest grabbed his genitals. Rather than admit his mistake and ask for forgiveness, he horribly maligned a man of the church. Those who worry about the influence of Christianity on American society need not worry about this guy at least.
Now you need not be a dumbass right wing extremist to ask whether Islam is compatible with a modern, secular society. This question was also asked by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk after WWI and he concluded that it was not. He therefore set about suppressing Islam in Turkey, the end being the creation of a secular republic. Iraq, Egypt and Algeria are among nations that have suppressed elements of Islam in the name of peace and progress. Large enclaves of Muslims have immigrated to Holland, France and other enlightened European societies and failed to assimilate. And yet, in bold irony, the Islamic world was once the great world center of science and progress.
The purpose of this essay, however, is not to examine Political Correctness or Islam or even Idiocy as an occasional American trait. It is to ask the question, is religion dangerous? Yes, I believe it is potentially quite dangerous. But why? Let us begin by drawing a sort of map of the experience of religion.
It is quite fashionable today among people of faith to speak disparagingly of religion. “I’m not religious, but I have faith,” they boast. This is a common proclamation of the nondenominational denominations (an example of Orwellian New-speak). No matter how you view it, though, their message is that if you don’t believe the way they do, you are not “saved” or among the “elect.” And yet, according to what I see in the scientific literature, it is precisely religion, and not faith, that seems to confer a health benefit. That relationship you have with your community and place of worship, experienced and shared with family and friends and in continuity through generations of ancestors seems to hold great power. One cannot have faith without religion, for religion is theology, philosophy, practice and other elements that give faith its character. If you don’t have religion, how can you have faith? Without religion, you can only have faith in nothing. Faith, it would seem, is a transcendent emanation or transcendent character of religion. It is possible, however, to have religion without faith, as we shall see later.
Religion has two aspects of experience. The first is internal. In Orthodox Christianity the internal element is essentially the internal experience of the yearning for God and the struggle to draw near to him and to break free of the gravitational pull of worldly obstacles in the spiritual journey. The character of this experience embraces prayer, meditation, fasting, vigils, reading scriptures and reading The Philokalia and other classics of Church Wisdom. The battleground of the salvation of the soul is the spiritual interior.
And as implied, there is an external experience as well. Among the Orthodox, the external elements of faith incorporate attendance at Divine Liturgy, acts of charity and love, and bearing witness of faith in a quietly dignified and pious life with strenuous vigilance against spiritual pride(4). It seems that the most important aspect of the external experience is the necessity to experience the Divine in one another, that for all of us except the Hesychasts(5), we are to realize our faith in the fullest manner in the context of community and fellowship.
For the Orthodox, it may be said that the interior faith is held higher than the exterior. You can have an interior experience of faith without the exterior; such is the experience of the holiest men and women. In fact, the process of seeking to draw ever nearer to God, for the Orthodox, is called Theosis and we believe it is the essential and eternal character of our relationship with the Almighty. I love this view of a dynamic afterlife. Most Christians I know seem to perceive Heaven as a moment on the porch after Sunday dinner (lunch, I grew up in the South), singing hymns and folks songs like on the Andy Griffith show. It is a moment of eternal happiness, where all is revealed and known and one can abide in everlasting repose. But to the Byzantine mind, this concept is stasis, and stasis is synonymous with death. In fact, the Greek word for resurrection is anastasis, or the opposite of stasis. Stillness is death but life has motion, and in Heaven there is not only the flutter of the cherubim and the seraphim but also the movement toward and the eternal discovery of the ineffable divine.
As previously adumbrated, it is also possible for people to have an external experience without the internal. In the Greek Orthodox Church, these individuals are generally educated academics who do not believe in a God or an afterlife, but who go to church to be with other Greeks, to speak Greek, to celebrate Greek Independence Day and to be in the “Greek Country Club” as one of my convert friends called it. I have had many friends and acquaintances through the years, Jews, Catholics, Episcopalians and many others who described to me that for them, going to church and participating in church life was a cultural activity without a faith experience.
So we have drawn a topography of faith and religion, internal and external, as Freud drew a topography of the mind. How does this help us discover the manner in which religion becomes a dangerous entity?
Religion poses a threat to us in two ways. The first is a general effect, a phenomenon of hatred and killing that arises out of the tendency to split ourselves into “us” and “them.” This binary thinking pattern engulfs religion as but one of many ways we dichotomize ourselves. Race is a famous example; in the United States there have been notorious examples of racial conflicts between blacks and whites and many others. In Rwanda, despite the fact that the combatants were of the same race, they managed to use simple physical characteristics such as body habitus as cause for hatred; ultimately being tall and slender became the reason for genocide (we call it genocide, but it was one people killing itself). Language, and even accent, can be sources of conflict, as can culture and customs even within one people. In religion it can be just as trivial; the bloodshed that took place in the Middle Ages between the Franks and the Byzantines had as its source a grammatical particle in the Nicene Creed. Whenever people split themselves into Sneetches(6) with and without stellate(7) belly buttons, however, the differences between them are the focus of the conflict but they are not the source. Generally, history teaches us, a conflict arises first, such as limited access to food or water or other resources, or even political power, and then the binary fission of a people occurs. I cannot speak for Islam or Hinduism, but in the case of Christianity, violence is precisely a failure of the religion and not a necessary manifestation of it. The Christian message is quite clear: Love others whether they are like you or not, love your enemies, do not repay violence in kind. We only occasionally get it right, unfortunately, but when religion is used as the fulcrum of hatred and violence, it is typically as an innocent bystander.
The other means by which religion becomes a source of conflict is an insidious poison. At its most basic level, it is the belief that my religion is the correct one, and yours is trash or apostasy or heresy. Many religions endorse the massacre of heretics and apostates, even Christianity at certain times in history. This dark spirituality has several foundations: the greatest one is fear, the fear that the apostate or heretic will eventually prevail, and the “good” religion will eventually be suppressed. Using the threat of death against “infidels” is a powerful admission of a lack of faith in one’s god and one’s religion. Fear is the source, but fear is also the weapon. A number of different religious communities in the world observe Westerners, with their liberated women and free speech and high standard of living, and they rightly worry about an exodus from their own communities; without liberty and openness they have only the fear of death as a barrier to the emptying of their places of worship. The killing of individuals who do not believe as we do may also be said to be an example of replacing the proper emphasis on internal religion with an improper emphasis on external religion. Other examples of improper externalization include the evangelical harangue and also efforts to suppress homosexuals. In the first case the Christians alienate the target of their spittle with self-righteousness; in the latter case they battle external homosexuality rather than internal homosexuality. And here I speak here in ignorance, but I believe this concept may correlate with the concept of jihad. Jihad used to mean the killing of the infidel, but for most Muslims today it means the inner struggle. The former interpretation is improper externalization of religion, the latter a peaceful inner journey.
Another dark spiritual foundation for the belief that my religion is the correct one is the universal human impulse to believe that I am better than others. By this way we can separate people into “saved” and “unsaved,” “clean” and “unclean,” “elect” and “spiritual hoi polloi(8). ” Once, parenthetically, in a conversation with one of my former medical students, I learned a little bit about how these ideas evolve. He was a newly minted Christian of the Calvinist school, aflame with the belief that God had chosen him for salvation without any choice or action on his own part, that he was one of the ELECT. I asked him if his prayers ever included “I thank Thee O Lord that I am not like other men,” and he responded “Of course!(9)” If we observe an individual eating something “unclean,” like pork, then that person is also unclean and we cannot touch that individual unless it is with a weapon! By de-spiritualizing or sub-spiritualizing an individual, so to speak, we dehumanize him, and it makes it quite a bit easier to kill that person. After all, they are below us, consuming precious resources, and why should vermin like them take food and water away from us, the People of the True God?
The Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church have gone to great pains to help us avoid these pitfalls (so when we fall into them anyway, it is all the more inexcusable!). There is no forbidden thing, which by abstaining from it, makes us clean and therefore better than others. We may use tobacco, although it is not particularly holy; I myself enjoy the occasional Parodi cigar. We may drink wine, although intoxication is viewed with dismay. We may eat pork, and beef, and shellfish, and we need not worry that one food will touch another and in so doing defile us. Despite the name, Orthodoxy or “correct praise,” we do not hold ourselves higher than our Catholic or Protestant brothers.
But it goes much further. Most of us, Orthodox theologians and Orthodox believers in the pews, believe that although it is God’s decision and not ours, we hope that all people will have paradise, all will have eternal life. We do not hold ourselves as saved while others are damned. It is perhaps the most vivid reminder that we are not in any way superior to others, that we are not less worthy of killing than Muslims or Hindus or Jews.
The Political Correctness angle is an interesting one. On Fox News radio on Sirius yesterday (11/14/09) I heard a journalist defend her profession by noting that there was so much misinformation coming out of this incident that they had to make sure they got the facts straight before they reported them. I burst into laughter when she said it, because the media reported all sorts of other inaccuracies with great relish (the shooter had been killed, the shooter was felled by a female police officer, and the police officer who stopped the shooter was a civilian and was killed and so on). And yet I can think of at least one legitimate reason why the media might want to approach the murderer’s religion with caution: Some Americans are idiots. In Utah Frank Roque, for example, murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi shortly after the 9/11 attacks; being an idiot he did not know the difference between a Sikh and an Arab. And being an evil idiot he killed an innocent man. Shortly after the Fort Hood massacre, Tampa Marine reservist Jasen Bruce, a man so dumb he cannot even spell his name, thought a Greek Orthodox priest was a Muslim terrorist and hit him in the head with a tire iron. Then, to save his own idiot ass, he fabricated a story that the priest grabbed his genitals. Rather than admit his mistake and ask for forgiveness, he horribly maligned a man of the church. Those who worry about the influence of Christianity on American society need not worry about this guy at least.
Now you need not be a dumbass right wing extremist to ask whether Islam is compatible with a modern, secular society. This question was also asked by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk after WWI and he concluded that it was not. He therefore set about suppressing Islam in Turkey, the end being the creation of a secular republic. Iraq, Egypt and Algeria are among nations that have suppressed elements of Islam in the name of peace and progress. Large enclaves of Muslims have immigrated to Holland, France and other enlightened European societies and failed to assimilate. And yet, in bold irony, the Islamic world was once the great world center of science and progress.
The purpose of this essay, however, is not to examine Political Correctness or Islam or even Idiocy as an occasional American trait. It is to ask the question, is religion dangerous? Yes, I believe it is potentially quite dangerous. But why? Let us begin by drawing a sort of map of the experience of religion.
It is quite fashionable today among people of faith to speak disparagingly of religion. “I’m not religious, but I have faith,” they boast. This is a common proclamation of the nondenominational denominations (an example of Orwellian New-speak). No matter how you view it, though, their message is that if you don’t believe the way they do, you are not “saved” or among the “elect.” And yet, according to what I see in the scientific literature, it is precisely religion, and not faith, that seems to confer a health benefit. That relationship you have with your community and place of worship, experienced and shared with family and friends and in continuity through generations of ancestors seems to hold great power. One cannot have faith without religion, for religion is theology, philosophy, practice and other elements that give faith its character. If you don’t have religion, how can you have faith? Without religion, you can only have faith in nothing. Faith, it would seem, is a transcendent emanation or transcendent character of religion. It is possible, however, to have religion without faith, as we shall see later.
Religion has two aspects of experience. The first is internal. In Orthodox Christianity the internal element is essentially the internal experience of the yearning for God and the struggle to draw near to him and to break free of the gravitational pull of worldly obstacles in the spiritual journey. The character of this experience embraces prayer, meditation, fasting, vigils, reading scriptures and reading The Philokalia and other classics of Church Wisdom. The battleground of the salvation of the soul is the spiritual interior.
And as implied, there is an external experience as well. Among the Orthodox, the external elements of faith incorporate attendance at Divine Liturgy, acts of charity and love, and bearing witness of faith in a quietly dignified and pious life with strenuous vigilance against spiritual pride(4). It seems that the most important aspect of the external experience is the necessity to experience the Divine in one another, that for all of us except the Hesychasts(5), we are to realize our faith in the fullest manner in the context of community and fellowship.
For the Orthodox, it may be said that the interior faith is held higher than the exterior. You can have an interior experience of faith without the exterior; such is the experience of the holiest men and women. In fact, the process of seeking to draw ever nearer to God, for the Orthodox, is called Theosis and we believe it is the essential and eternal character of our relationship with the Almighty. I love this view of a dynamic afterlife. Most Christians I know seem to perceive Heaven as a moment on the porch after Sunday dinner (lunch, I grew up in the South), singing hymns and folks songs like on the Andy Griffith show. It is a moment of eternal happiness, where all is revealed and known and one can abide in everlasting repose. But to the Byzantine mind, this concept is stasis, and stasis is synonymous with death. In fact, the Greek word for resurrection is anastasis, or the opposite of stasis. Stillness is death but life has motion, and in Heaven there is not only the flutter of the cherubim and the seraphim but also the movement toward and the eternal discovery of the ineffable divine.
As previously adumbrated, it is also possible for people to have an external experience without the internal. In the Greek Orthodox Church, these individuals are generally educated academics who do not believe in a God or an afterlife, but who go to church to be with other Greeks, to speak Greek, to celebrate Greek Independence Day and to be in the “Greek Country Club” as one of my convert friends called it. I have had many friends and acquaintances through the years, Jews, Catholics, Episcopalians and many others who described to me that for them, going to church and participating in church life was a cultural activity without a faith experience.
So we have drawn a topography of faith and religion, internal and external, as Freud drew a topography of the mind. How does this help us discover the manner in which religion becomes a dangerous entity?
Religion poses a threat to us in two ways. The first is a general effect, a phenomenon of hatred and killing that arises out of the tendency to split ourselves into “us” and “them.” This binary thinking pattern engulfs religion as but one of many ways we dichotomize ourselves. Race is a famous example; in the United States there have been notorious examples of racial conflicts between blacks and whites and many others. In Rwanda, despite the fact that the combatants were of the same race, they managed to use simple physical characteristics such as body habitus as cause for hatred; ultimately being tall and slender became the reason for genocide (we call it genocide, but it was one people killing itself). Language, and even accent, can be sources of conflict, as can culture and customs even within one people. In religion it can be just as trivial; the bloodshed that took place in the Middle Ages between the Franks and the Byzantines had as its source a grammatical particle in the Nicene Creed. Whenever people split themselves into Sneetches(6) with and without stellate(7) belly buttons, however, the differences between them are the focus of the conflict but they are not the source. Generally, history teaches us, a conflict arises first, such as limited access to food or water or other resources, or even political power, and then the binary fission of a people occurs. I cannot speak for Islam or Hinduism, but in the case of Christianity, violence is precisely a failure of the religion and not a necessary manifestation of it. The Christian message is quite clear: Love others whether they are like you or not, love your enemies, do not repay violence in kind. We only occasionally get it right, unfortunately, but when religion is used as the fulcrum of hatred and violence, it is typically as an innocent bystander.
The other means by which religion becomes a source of conflict is an insidious poison. At its most basic level, it is the belief that my religion is the correct one, and yours is trash or apostasy or heresy. Many religions endorse the massacre of heretics and apostates, even Christianity at certain times in history. This dark spirituality has several foundations: the greatest one is fear, the fear that the apostate or heretic will eventually prevail, and the “good” religion will eventually be suppressed. Using the threat of death against “infidels” is a powerful admission of a lack of faith in one’s god and one’s religion. Fear is the source, but fear is also the weapon. A number of different religious communities in the world observe Westerners, with their liberated women and free speech and high standard of living, and they rightly worry about an exodus from their own communities; without liberty and openness they have only the fear of death as a barrier to the emptying of their places of worship. The killing of individuals who do not believe as we do may also be said to be an example of replacing the proper emphasis on internal religion with an improper emphasis on external religion. Other examples of improper externalization include the evangelical harangue and also efforts to suppress homosexuals. In the first case the Christians alienate the target of their spittle with self-righteousness; in the latter case they battle external homosexuality rather than internal homosexuality. And here I speak here in ignorance, but I believe this concept may correlate with the concept of jihad. Jihad used to mean the killing of the infidel, but for most Muslims today it means the inner struggle. The former interpretation is improper externalization of religion, the latter a peaceful inner journey.
Another dark spiritual foundation for the belief that my religion is the correct one is the universal human impulse to believe that I am better than others. By this way we can separate people into “saved” and “unsaved,” “clean” and “unclean,” “elect” and “spiritual hoi polloi(8). ” Once, parenthetically, in a conversation with one of my former medical students, I learned a little bit about how these ideas evolve. He was a newly minted Christian of the Calvinist school, aflame with the belief that God had chosen him for salvation without any choice or action on his own part, that he was one of the ELECT. I asked him if his prayers ever included “I thank Thee O Lord that I am not like other men,” and he responded “Of course!(9)” If we observe an individual eating something “unclean,” like pork, then that person is also unclean and we cannot touch that individual unless it is with a weapon! By de-spiritualizing or sub-spiritualizing an individual, so to speak, we dehumanize him, and it makes it quite a bit easier to kill that person. After all, they are below us, consuming precious resources, and why should vermin like them take food and water away from us, the People of the True God?
The Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church have gone to great pains to help us avoid these pitfalls (so when we fall into them anyway, it is all the more inexcusable!). There is no forbidden thing, which by abstaining from it, makes us clean and therefore better than others. We may use tobacco, although it is not particularly holy; I myself enjoy the occasional Parodi cigar. We may drink wine, although intoxication is viewed with dismay. We may eat pork, and beef, and shellfish, and we need not worry that one food will touch another and in so doing defile us. Despite the name, Orthodoxy or “correct praise,” we do not hold ourselves higher than our Catholic or Protestant brothers.
But it goes much further. Most of us, Orthodox theologians and Orthodox believers in the pews, believe that although it is God’s decision and not ours, we hope that all people will have paradise, all will have eternal life. We do not hold ourselves as saved while others are damned. It is perhaps the most vivid reminder that we are not in any way superior to others, that we are not less worthy of killing than Muslims or Hindus or Jews.
Why then, asked one of my Sunday school students, be Orthodox? Why not just be Methodist? They don’t have to fast, and their liturgy is not so long. I answered with a story.
Old Stavros died and went to heaven. He was greeted by St. Peter, who said “Stavros, how do you account for your life?”
“Well, I was a pious Orthodox Christian; I gave generously to the Church, I prayed and loved my family, I tried to help people as much as I could. Most of all, I loved God.”
“Welcome to Paradise!” said St. Peter.
Then Tony the Catholic appeared. “Anthony,” asked St. Peter, “how do you account for your life?”
“Well, I took good care of my family and I went to Mass as often as I could. I went to confession, I took communion, and I loved God as best I could.”
“Welcome to Paradise!” said St. Peter.
Then St. Peter admitted Timothy the Baptist, Elliott the Jew, Ismail the Muslim. Stavros watched all of this with great concern. He approached St. Peter. “St. Peter, if I may…this hardly seems fair!”
“Indeed!” said the Saint. “How so?”
“Well I was a pious Orthodox Christian my whole life, serving the One True Church, and these others receive the same eternal reward as me!”
“Well, you are quite right Stavros, it is very unfair.” Stavros was a little surprised. “For you see, you had Orthodoxy your entire life, but these others only have it now.”
Salvation may not be universal, it is not our call. Only God, who is absolutely sovereign, will decide whom he gathers to him in the next age. But the belief that all people are of the same value before God is a distinct hedge against monstrous behavior toward people of other faiths, and it does not presuppose that we are telling God what to do.
(1) In Charleston, SC where I lived for ten years, “palmetto bugs” are a euphemism for giant cockroaches. They universally inspire disgust. Palmetto bugs stream into even the most elegant of Charleston homes from the sewers through plumbing, especially during thunderstorms.
(2) In epidemiology and infectious diseases a “vector” is an animal that carries a disease and spreads it. An example would be the Deer Tick and Lyme disease, the former being the vector for the latter.
(3) An Austin TX conspiracy theorist. Even though he believes that 9/11 was an “inside job” and has some really strange opinions on modern medicine, I have to say that I listen to him regularly. I consider him just as reliable a source of information as the “mainstream media.” Whatever that is. Does not the Mainstream Media also disseminate foolishness, such as the idea that the earth is getting colder because of global warming?
(4) Pride is an ugly sin; in The Philokalia one of the blessed fathers says that pride is the worst of all sins, that it wanders the streets of the walled city at night while the citizens sleep, opening the gates to the host of other sins.
(5) Those who are called to life of quiet and solitude.
(6) According to Dr. Seuss.
(7) Star-like.
(8) Greek for “the rabble.”
(9) See the Biblical story of the Pharisee and the Publican, Luke Chapter 18.
Copyright 2009 Robert Albanese
Old Stavros died and went to heaven. He was greeted by St. Peter, who said “Stavros, how do you account for your life?”
“Well, I was a pious Orthodox Christian; I gave generously to the Church, I prayed and loved my family, I tried to help people as much as I could. Most of all, I loved God.”
“Welcome to Paradise!” said St. Peter.
Then Tony the Catholic appeared. “Anthony,” asked St. Peter, “how do you account for your life?”
“Well, I took good care of my family and I went to Mass as often as I could. I went to confession, I took communion, and I loved God as best I could.”
“Welcome to Paradise!” said St. Peter.
Then St. Peter admitted Timothy the Baptist, Elliott the Jew, Ismail the Muslim. Stavros watched all of this with great concern. He approached St. Peter. “St. Peter, if I may…this hardly seems fair!”
“Indeed!” said the Saint. “How so?”
“Well I was a pious Orthodox Christian my whole life, serving the One True Church, and these others receive the same eternal reward as me!”
“Well, you are quite right Stavros, it is very unfair.” Stavros was a little surprised. “For you see, you had Orthodoxy your entire life, but these others only have it now.”
Salvation may not be universal, it is not our call. Only God, who is absolutely sovereign, will decide whom he gathers to him in the next age. But the belief that all people are of the same value before God is a distinct hedge against monstrous behavior toward people of other faiths, and it does not presuppose that we are telling God what to do.
(1) In Charleston, SC where I lived for ten years, “palmetto bugs” are a euphemism for giant cockroaches. They universally inspire disgust. Palmetto bugs stream into even the most elegant of Charleston homes from the sewers through plumbing, especially during thunderstorms.
(2) In epidemiology and infectious diseases a “vector” is an animal that carries a disease and spreads it. An example would be the Deer Tick and Lyme disease, the former being the vector for the latter.
(3) An Austin TX conspiracy theorist. Even though he believes that 9/11 was an “inside job” and has some really strange opinions on modern medicine, I have to say that I listen to him regularly. I consider him just as reliable a source of information as the “mainstream media.” Whatever that is. Does not the Mainstream Media also disseminate foolishness, such as the idea that the earth is getting colder because of global warming?
(4) Pride is an ugly sin; in The Philokalia one of the blessed fathers says that pride is the worst of all sins, that it wanders the streets of the walled city at night while the citizens sleep, opening the gates to the host of other sins.
(5) Those who are called to life of quiet and solitude.
(6) According to Dr. Seuss.
(7) Star-like.
(8) Greek for “the rabble.”
(9) See the Biblical story of the Pharisee and the Publican, Luke Chapter 18.
Copyright 2009 Robert Albanese
