It's easy for lots of "revolutionaries" to dismiss
> religion as "the opiate of the people" while completely ignoring power as
> the opiate of the bureaucrats and revolutionary leaders or dogmatism as the
> opiate of the Left, etc.
I do not like, I am exceedingly pissed off at, this "lots of 'revolutionaries.'" I simply don't believe they exist as any significant presence on the left, just as I decided a few weeks ago that I simply did not believe in the existence, on any significant scale, of a "humorless left," and just as I don't believe, in fact, in the existence on any significant scale of most of the other "lefts" that so many leftists seem so anxious to whine about.
The leftists on this list, I dare say, can be divided with little remainder into two groups: those whose practice has involved almost continuous close collaborative work with religious people for as many years as they have been on the left (in my case 30+) and those whose relationship to religious people consists of whining to other leftists about how we have to work with religious people. And religious people who can be worked with are not so damned tender either. They can take it.
As the gulf war was nearing an end and the anti-war movement was melting away, our committee here had what proved to be a last meeting, and at one point the question of when to schedule our next meeting, and I suggested the following Sunday. "That's Easter Sunday," someone remarked, and I spontaneously squeaked out, "Oh those damned christians." Everyone laughed good-naturedly (and my wife and I happened to be the only non-catholics in the room).
That's been my experience for nearly 35 years. That's been the experience of almost every leftist from different parts of the country with whom I've worked. Never once, in those decades, have I ever heard any fellow leftist get up and claim that we musn't work with christians. And yet this stupid thread has been going on as if the revolution depended on convincing all those leftists around that they should stop spitting in the face of their christian comrades.
Shit!
Carrol