Two thousand years ago, a minor Roman bureaucrat by the name of Pontius Pilate asked a question that many in our modern, 21st century society would find very relevant: "What is truth?"

Some time ago, I was checking out at my local market during the winter holiday season. Making the usual conversation with the young man who was ringing up my purchases, I commented on how the weather had cleared up, to which he responded, "I was hoping for more rain."

The hectic Christmas shopping rush that began before Thanksgiving is over. It came and went with the usual hype about its importance for the economy, with gloomy predictions about how "the sky is falling" and the looming economic collapse of the good ol' USA.

The big headline in the Financial Times on Wednesday, October 17, 2007, was "Investors flee US securities." It seems that "[f]oreign investors slashed their holdings of US securities by a record amount as the credit squeeze intensified." Apparently, faith in America as a good investment is diminishing.

The article quotes Alan Ruskin, chief investment strategist for RBS Greenwich Capital, as saying, "The bad news is that [the data] plainly show how vulnerable the dollar is to a continuation of the credit crunch-risk adverse environment."

In its early days, the religion of Islam was spread by the sword as it expanded across the Middle East, northern Africa, and into Spain. By 1683, a Muslim army had almost reached the gates of Vienna before it was driven back.