30. The finite world, of course, is full of efforts to circumvent this reality of our existence. Western history is full of moments in which a community has formulated its grasp of truth in rigidly defined terms and shown itself willing to enforce itto the point of executing inconvenient people who refuse to accept the formulae. Whether one thinks of the Late Roman Empire's persecution of Christians, of the Crusades (both internal and external to Europe), of the Inquisition of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, of the Wars of Religion in the seventeenth century, or of the more modern atrocities of Nazism and Soviet Communism, the picture is fundamentally the same in terms of its dynamics: those who claim possession of the truth regard themselves as authorized to inflict it on others by any means possible. They set themselves, consciously or not, on the side of the infinite (as if any finite being could ever embody that reality) and thus clothe themselves with an authority that knows no bounds. Torture and murder then become nothing more than the execution of righteousness. We should like to think of this behavior as exceptional, and, in its worst manifestations, it may be. But it persists at less dramatic levels through human society in general. (Since I know Western history better than that of other parts of the world, I have drawn my examples from there. But I have seen no evidence that other cultures are immune to these temptations.)