These were the seeds of Huxley's agnosticism, scientific enthusiasm, and understanding of sectarian power play.
Still, given the gaps in the United States' own reporting on civilian casualties, the Iraqis' statistics can help the Americans round out their understanding of sectarian tensions in Iraq.
ISIS represents a great threat to stability in Iraq and Syria, but the panelists agree that effective U.S. interventions will require a bigger-picture understanding of sectarian conflict across the Arab world.
"In Iraq the failures of covert intelligence were compounded by the absence of political intelligence: a comprehensive lack of the understanding of sectarian forces and fault lines present across the country," he disclosed recently.
They point away from sectarian doctrine toward an understanding of Christianity -- and other major religions -- as a complex pattern of behavior that can alter a person's entire way of relating to the world and other people.
Many a "Frontline" documentary has made a convincing case that the Bush administration's mistakes were compounded by the blinkered thinking of leaders who rushed to war without sufficient support around the world or understanding of the religious and sectarian strains on the ground.
Must the state abstain from considering and acting upon certain kinds of consideration in order to rise above the sectarian adherence or invocation of one controversial understanding of what makes for a good life?
When this process is applied to the Creative Word -- the revealed teachings of the divine religions -- it makes possible powerful ways to develop and test new understandings of those teachings, not by sectarian conflict but by application and evaluation.
Most moving is the young woman's dawning understanding of her father, a despairing dissenter against "sectarian fever", who packed his bags for Beirut.
One popular understanding of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's war against his countrymen holds that it is a sectarian conflict between the Alawite minority and the Sunni majority.
