MICHAEL VLAHOS: What makes war possible is the sacrifice—both of our own and of The Other. Sacrifice is the central purpose of war (and terrorism)—and physical instrumentality the means to its end. The purpose of each institution terrorism is to create a ritual and symbolic sacrificial theater in which the very drama and intensity of the collective, lived experience alters the human landscape. The strongest, surest way to realize such a shift is through mass, orchestrated, human sacrifice.

RICHARD KOENIGSBERG: It was happening when I wrote this Newsletter one year ago, and it's happening again TODAY. Warfare has to continue to happen because warfare is profoundly desired--an institutional template that societies and human beings cannot live without.

It can be this war or that war. As long as war is going on, human beings feel secure. The world is as it should be. SEE HOW EXCITED THE REPORTERS GET. Everyone loves war (as long as the suffering and victims are "over there"). 

By 2000, it seemed we had reached "the end of history." But Bin Laden resurrected the dream--the fantasy that there are objects (conceived as omnipotent) that human beings wish to die and kill for. 

Biological "aggression?" What nonsense. Hundreds-of-millions of human beings die and kill for abstract entities--gods and nation-states. 

Dead human beings don't pass their genes along. But how profoundly satisfying to know there is "something to kill and die for;" entities existing above and beyond concrete experience.

Michael Vlahos, PhD is the author of Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change.