Is there a way to deal with radical Islam and still have religious freedom?

Who would have thought that as we learn more and more about our world and our universe, religion would be dragging us closer and closer to the eve of destruction?

As I write this, there are terrorist attacks ongoing in Paris with more than 140 people dead, and it certainly appears that radical Islam is behind them.

Friday evening in Paris.

Theoretically, radical Islamists have one advantage the rest of us don't in this war or sorts.

Osama bin Laden explained it when he said Americans could not defeat Al Qaeda.

"They want to live. We are not afraid to die."

It's similar to what John F. Kennedy said when he said no president could ever truly be protected from an assassin. If someone is willing to trade his life for that of the president, the odds are very high that he will succeed.

A lot of people don't understand that we lost a lot more than people on Sept. 11, 2001, and it was all part of the plan. All you have to do is look at the Patriot Act and at all the NSA spying going on and you see that bin Laden succeeded in making us surrender a significant amount of our freedom.

One of my favorite travel memories is from 1990, when I was covering college basketball for the Reno Gazette-Journal. I was driving from Moscow, Idaho, to the Spokane airport when my rental car skidded off the road and got stuck in a snowdrift. By the time I got pulled out, I had 24 minutes till my flight was scheduled to depart and 23 miles to cover -- on snowy roads.

Spokane Airport

Thankfully, it was a small airport. I arrived with 2 minutes left, tossed the keys to the car rental people and sprinted to the gate. I got there with the door to the plane half-open.

Thanks to bin Laden, nothing like that will ever happen again.

But I've gotten away from my point. If there are a billion Muslims in the world, and only 1 percent sympathize with terrorism, that's still 10 million people. And if only 1 percent of that 1 percent actually participate in terrorism, that's still 100,000 terrorists.

That can make for a lot of Parises.

Of course we have more problems in this country than just Islam, although being Americans, most of the others don't seem to want to destroy property. We've got fundamentalist Christian preachers who apparently have enough influence to attract three Republican presidential candidates to a rally where they call for the death of gays and lesbians. We've got another candidate, Ben Carson, who has said he would go back in time to kill Baby Hitler if he could, but he would not kill Hitler by aborting him in his mother's womb.

Then there are the super-Orthodox Jews, who won't seem to give an inch in a possible compromise for peace in the Middle East. It's tough to blame them too much, because there doesn't seem to be any give from the Muslim side either.

The thing that may be the toughest to solve here is the problem just might be religion itself.