Sunday, December 08, 2002  The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel P.
Huntington (1996)  and the Remaking of World Order Simon &
Schuster, New York 1996.  {p. 40} Human history is the history
of civilizations. It is impossible to think of the development
of humanity in any other terms  {p. 42} The key cultural
elements which define a civilization were set forth in classic
form by the Athenians when they reassured the Spartans that they
would not betray them to the Persians ...  Blood, language,
religion, way of life, were what the Greeks had in common and
what distinguished them from the Persians and other non-Greeks.
Of all the objective elements which define civilizations,
however, the most important usually is religion, as the
Athenians emphasized. To a very large degree, the major
civilizations in human history have been closely identified with
the world's great religions; and people who share ethnicity and
language but differ in religion may slaughter each other, as
happened in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia,