Griffin: 9/11 and the American Empire - Physics911

Griffin: 9/11 and the American Empire - Physics911: "The transcript of this speech, from http://www.911citizenswatch.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=535 , follows below:
Transcript: 9/11 and the American Empire: How Should Religious People Respond? Posted by: Kyle Hence by David Ray Griffin
[Note: This lecture was delivered at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on April 18, 2005, and first broadcast by C-Span2 (BookTV) on April 30. Although this text does not correspond exactly to the lecture as orally delivered, all the differences are trivial except that, of course, the oral presentation had to get along without footnotes. DRG]
I will begin by unpacking the key terms in the title of my talk: �9/11,� �American empire,� and �religious people,� beginning with the last one. 1. Religious People
Although I am a Christian theologian, I am in this talk addressing religious people in general. I am doing so because I believe that religious people should respond to 9/11 and the American empire in a particular way because of moral principles of their religious traditions that are common to all the historic religious traditions.1 I have in mind principles such as: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors� oil. Thou shalt not murder thy neighbors in order to steal their oil. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbors, accusing them of illicitly harboring weapons of mass destruction, in order to justify killing them in order to steal their oil. This language is, of course, language that we associate with the Abrahamic religions�Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But the same basic ideas can be found in other religious traditions. I turn now to �American empire,� which has been a highly contentious term.
2. American Empire: Divergent V"