Chomsky's case that a criminal proceeding would be the correct way to respond to al-Qaida makes moral sense, but it would be a complete failure in reality. There is simply no way that bin Laden and other true believers in his cause will permit themselves to be taken alive by any power on earth. The reason for this assessment is that bin Laden's group is actually a millenarian and apocalyptic religious movement, as well as an astonishingly successful and powerful political one.

Al-Qaida has all the earmarks of a cult: a closed society with a highly charismatic leader (though there is room to doubt the extent to which bin Laden, charismatic as he is, actually commands and controls the actions of the group -- he may be little more than an influential front man) and a dualistic worldview that aims to purify the world by ridding it of sources of perceived evil. However, Chomsky and other analysts miss an important point in following the old distinction of religious and political motives. Especially in the case of millenarian movements like this one, a rigid observation of the distinction can be misleading.

The distinguishing feature of all millenarianism, especially in its militant forms, is the aim to cleanse the world. It is false to make ending the world decisive, for the actual destruction of the planet is never taken as a goal. The utter futility of that exercise is clear even to the most devoted fanatic. Instead all millennialism aims to end the order of the world. The world that will end is the world in the sense of St. Augustine: the devil's realm, Satan's sandbox.

Those committed to this aim frequently but not necessarily invoke divine intervention because their fundamental belief systems lead them to suppose that no other power is capable of such a colossal task. It is the enormous size of the task that inspires them to suggest motifs of world destruction like those in the Book of Revelation, but these passages must always be read symbolically. The aim of apocalypse is always political, which permits us to recognize that even rigidly secular movements like Nazism and Marxism are fully apocalyptic in their movements. They invoke the merely superhuman instead of the supernatural, but that is a distinction that makes little difference. The locus of power is supposed to be in natural instead of in divine law, but the aim is the same: a lethal purity brought about by a return (or advance) to an imagined state of paradise.

What this means in practice is that those who are fully committed to this cause cannot be expected to surrender under any circumstances to the powers of the secular world that inevitably oppose them. Perhaps like others I was surprised by the ease with which the Taliban and lower-rank al-Qaida fighters caved in, though not in the least by the elusiveness of the upper echelons of those movements. But I do find room to wonder that they have not elected that martyrdom which they dispense so freely to their underlings.

This may be because they have not achieved their primary goal, which is a worldwide awakening in Islam, leading to the overthrow of its many corrupt and unjust governments and the institution of a revived caliphate, a universal ummah. The defeat of the secular world, symbolized in the U.S., is a secondary aim. The attack on the U.S. can be read as an opening salvo in this more important struggle. Its aim was to bring on that awakening in what bin Laden and company surely expected to be a debacle like that they inflicted on the Soviet Union. This would have demonstrated beyond any doubt that al-Qaida had the blessings of Allah and quite likely would have achieved the desired result. The failure of the U.S. to fall into the trap has apparently cost bin Laden much of his charisma in the Muslim world, but it surely will lead it to plan another and possibly more destructive strike.

Charisma imposes an impossible demand for daily miracles on its possessors. In most cases these miracles need not be large, but this is an apocalyptic game of much higher stakes than we have seen in recent years. Even, or especially, the deaths of Omar and bin Laden will not end it.

-- Ted Daniels, Ph.D., editor of "A Doomsday Reader," NYU Press, 1999

Read "A Conversation with E.O. Wilson" by John Glassie.

Much as I respect and have enjoyed Wilson's work, his interview displays a blindness about the potential of space colonization that is common in academia. Indeed, the movement of the human race into space habitats is likely to achieve many of the ends he wishes for our species better than could be hoped for if we remain forever on the earth.

He is correct that we are changing into a more homogenous gene pool, apparently unconcerned that by doing so our species will lose the very genetic diversity whose loss he laments in all other species. The best way to promote human genetic diversity, and the diversity of all those plants and animals we cherish and depend on, is to colonize space.

He claims that we are exquisitely adapted to Earth's environment. In fact, we are exquisitely adapted to Africa's environment. Other, harsher environments (like North America) have been successfully and happily colonized by the grace of our technology, our ability to adapt to previously inhospitable conditions. Fire, clothing, flint-tipped spears and agriculture are technology, not genes.

He is right that a mass migration of our species into space would be ruinously expensive. But a gradual transfer of the industrial processes that sustain modern human life into non-biosphere-polluting, resource-rich space environs would be a great benefit to our precious and fragile home. It'll take centuries to turn the earth into a nature reserve, but it can happen only when we start moving into space.

Finally, the statement that our species will survive until the sun dies is the best argument for establishing our species on planets orbiting other suns. We can no more imagine traveling to other suns now than a Spaniard in 1491 could imagine sailing west to the Indies. But that is exactly what humans do, ever since the first band of Homo erectus left Africa.

I do hope Dr. Wilson will reconsider his position on space colonization.

-- Doug Zartman

If the soul as a realm of consciousness is a dead issue (it always has been from a strictly scientific standpoint), then how valuable and meaningful is a human existence that comes forth out of a conceptual nothingness, suffers and then passes back into that nothingness regardless of the "quality" of the suffering that goes on in that human existence?

Where is the incentive in human existence to develop altruism if, as it is plainly scientifically evident, all human individuals, before they expire, lose everything that has ever meant anything to them whatsoever?

Does it not seem strange that life, in the universal sense, would be able to survive to evolve to the level of humanity if meaning can be found only in a strict adherence to the principle of a purely physical, visceral survival?

I apologize to those atheistically inclined, but on the point of the notion of consciousness being a "dead" issue, I must disagree. If universal life is happening now, it must have always been in this universe in the first place. And if it always has been, it must certainly continue for all time.

While I might be persuaded to agree that the more contemporary religious notions of a human soul are pitifully naive, it seems nonsensical to me that some aspect of human consciousness is not somehow an integral part of a universal and eternal life force.

-- Greg Mucha

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