The sad part of it is if you take god out of it much of the problem goes away.

There would still be godless despots like Sadam Hussein to deal with but there would be no holy places in Israel, no defiling of holy land in Saudi Arabia. We could feed them, help them, to whatever extent they wished to be helped, and negotiate with them without the mindless passion of religious extremism on either side.

If bin Ladin & Co. have their way, the world will be polarized and millions will die. Very likely, most of the dead will be his people. No reasonable person can believe that if he succeeds in making this about them and us that 1.5 billion Muslims would have any better chance than the millions of South and North American natives. He will be responsible for the utter destruction of all that he values.

At the end of that slaughter what kind of people would we be? After living through that horror would there be enough respect for human life left to prevent us from finding other reasons to kill each other.

That is the apocalypse scenario. I don't think it will come to that. Things usually don't work out as bad or as good as they might. We will probably have a better feel for it in the next few weeks.