Maha-Shakti - Dont' mean to pick on you but there are a couple of points which I'd like to address, if I may. You seem to distinguish between rural and urban folk - privileged and not-so-privileged folks in Nepal. I wish you could do the same in the US. I have been to and lived in areas besides the two coasts - the South included - and I know what you are talking about. It is because of that very experience that I feel Americans cannot - and for that matter no people in the world can - be collectively termed stupid. Your example reminds me of an American tourist who went trekking in Jomsom and came back and reported to his friends that people in Nepal have never heard about computers just because the people he met on his trek had not heard about them. Both are cases of over generalization, and sorry to say this, smack of intellectual laziness that so often gives rise to convenient generalizations like these. So just because some parts of America, have higher rates of poverty and lower rates of "world-awareness" (for lack of a better phrase), how does that make Americans collectively stupid? Isn't that like saying we Nepalese don't know what computers are? As for the Church - it's revival is most intense in the Bible belt and the deep South - the same parts of America that suffer most from poverty. Religious institutions have been growing everywhere in the world where there is poverty and problems. Take Nepal for example , Christian missionaries have been most affective in areas that have been the most underdeveloped and hardest hit by poverty. I am not linking poverty with religion but when there is poverty, like in vast swatch of the Bible belt, and some parts of the rural South, it can only be expected that religion fills the vacuum left by the failure of the secular state and businesses to improve people's lives. Therefore, we need to look at the big picture that encompasses all areas and aspects of America - or Nepal or any other country - before coming to conclusion about the people in that country. My 2 (additional) cents.