Just back from on the town.
Back to India, PSac, no I guess I really don't believe India would be better off still under the dominion of the UK. I wonder, however, if its independence might have been better orchestrated by someone secular, although I have doubts it would have happened at all if that had been the case. India was and still is a highly religious country and needed someone to look up to in order to coalesce and rise up against the British. Ghandi filled the bill. But it's just too easy to blame human nature alone for horrific violence done in the name of god (or gods, in the Hindus' case). The savagery is of course inate. I won't argue with you there. We are as a species not all that far removed from the other animals, after all. The thing about religion, though, is that it holds us back from advancing our tolerance toward one another. In India we have a vivid example of an indigenous people, all of the same race, some even of the same family, whose only difference was what they believed and for that sole reason they murdered one another. To suppose that the slaughters that happened in 1947 would have happened anyway, even if all Indians were either Hindu or Muslim, is not defensible. Directly or indirectly, religion was the cause, and that cannot be denied.