cats and their many issues

Well, it seems that my cat has been officially inducted into the Hall of Fame for "Being as Complicated as His/Her Owner." Dad and I took Mickey in the car on an adventure to the vet today, which we were sure would yield good results after January's showing of him weighing in at 15 pounds.

Not so. My formerly little Munchkin now weighs a whopping 17 pounds and they say that we've got to get him losing weight soon or he may be at risk for diabetes or urinary tract problems. :( But he's as chipper as ever, actually--we're playing fetch at the moment. He's the only cat I know who won't look at you like you just stepped off Mars when you throw something and ask him to go get it. Makes me wonder what kind of cross breeding they do at the Salem Humane Society.

In other news, 87 Iraqi men are dead across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean...can someone please point out the perks of religiously-based fighting to me? Both sides are obviously so committed to their individual beliefs that neither one is going to cave. Even if one group is conquered they'll merely wait for a few hundred years, when they can regroup and kill all of the decendents of their original adversaries.

If I sound a bit bitter on this particular topic, I should. Aside from the constant headlines regarding slaughter in Iraq, I've been reading James Michener's "The Source" for the last couple weeks, which is a fictional but historically based tale of a town called Makor all the way back to around 9000 B.C.E. Essentially, it tracks the formation of the Jewish faith and its interactions with the Canaanites, the Greeks, the Romans, the Christians, etc. I'm at the point in the story where the Crusaders make their entrance.

The recurring theme in every single damned section of this book is probably very accurate, and that scares me--the theme is death, and lots of it. Much of it coming by very violent means. Michner poses a very interesting question, though--one that comes up in many major religious works--and that is, who makes it okay for one group to kill another based on differences in worship?

Unfortunately, the answer is usually that group's conception of instructions they have been given from God/Yahweh/YHWH/Allah/etc.

I wonder where the mass killings in the name of God will start in the U.S. first.