What Do YOU Believe And More Importantly, Why?

What kind of a news person, reader, would rather have a terrorist be something other than what they are so as to de-emphasize prejudices? MSNBC's Contessa Brewer. Or as in Judith Miller's case on Fox News Watch , we have to learn to get inside these peoples heads so as to understand them. They both make me cringe and in their own way, they're saying the same thing. The poor mis-understood terrorist.

It's really not all that complicated, ladies. It's their religion. It's what they believe, for whatever reason and no amount of breast beating on our part is going to change that.

I got to thinking about people and their religious beliefs. How long has it been since you have sat down and actually thought about why you believe what you do? There are as many religions and offshoots as there are millions of people believing in their premises. Not all are the same by any stretch. Some promote peace and good will, others live and let live and yet others death to all who disbelieve. Somewhere in that hodgepodge there must be a common thread. I don't think it's the belief in a supreme being as much as it's the filling of an inner need. The need to understand our very existence and justify our place in the world.

Obama wasn't all wrong when he spoke of people clinging to their religion and their guns during times of turmoil. It's a comfort zone, sanctuary even, from the troublesome unknown and least understood. An excellent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal speaks to how those who value their religious beliefs over any nation have found themselves disenfranchised no matter where they reside.

Think about it. This country was settled by people who were disenfranchised from the religious beliefs foisted upon them by England, the Jews, Catholics in Northern Ireland. To varying degrees, it is not just Muslim. They just happen to have the most violent of extremists.

It really has nothing the news folk would so like to find. They aren't necessarily loners, underachievers nor poor and uneducated. It's what they've come to believe and they are just as faithful to their beliefs as we are to ours. We are in a ideological fight with those who's beliefs are the antithesis of ours. Where we would open our arms to include them, they would cut ours off as a punishment.

To try to understand that is futile; better minds than Judith Miller's have tried and failed. And to hope a failed terror attempt was the act of someone other than one with that mindset displays a lack of intellect that should be banned from the air. Changing the color of the skin, the accent or religion makes it no less deplorable. What we don't need is more.