I am also, through reading and thinking about and retyping and commenting on thousands of pages of milton scholarship very near to an expert in several varieties of christian theology. And yet you or someone asks asshole questions about the most superficial parts of the history of the "Religions of the Book" as medieval Islam called them. My barber is the leader of the local Black Muslim community (in fact he founded it), he knows that I hold his religion to be equally false with christianity, we chat amicably about the crimes of imperialism and ignore quite happily the differences between us. And idiots and assholes on an e-mail list, hallucinating a left that never existed outside the fevered imaginations of the Wall Street Journal or Time Life, rant and rave about how hypothetical leftists are bigots because they simply insist that part of the duty of the left is to tell the truth, and part of telling the truth is making it clear that religion is a serious barrier to human survival.
Which has NOTHING TO DO with practical decisions on how to write the leaflet for a boycott or what speakers to have at an anti-war rally or the necessity for leftists to treat people like humans, something that leftists as a whole are a hell of a lot better at than most Christians. LBO-talk is a maillist, not a local coalition trying to plan daily activity, and to confuse the two simply makes discourse impossible.
And I for one am sick and tired with trying to hold a conversation with idiots who try to make 1/2 of 1% of the real intellectual, practical and organizational issues that confront the left, and who seem to want to go out of their way to select precisely those issues which let them wail on and on about what horrible people all other leftists are. If you want to wallow in self-hate and self-pity, do so.
If you are working with people in prison, talk about it and stop whining about mostly non-existent ills of a mostly non-existent left. You remind me of someone worrying about what kind of cake frosting to put on a birthday cake when they are out of flour and the nearest grain mill is a 100 walking miles away.
Carrol
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > Yoshie, Probably you and I together have read more on all varieties of
> > religion than this reactionary dreams exist. Obviously he and others like
> > him won't be there when things get rough,
>
> When things get rough? Where are you talking from? I work with people in prisons
> and I am working in the southwest to stop Intel from sucking NM dry. It's just like
> the elite socialist sect to set itself up as the Messiah and then cast slurs at
> anyone else who really works with the poor and dispossessed.
>
> > they will be off in a corner
> > weeping about why couldn't we get Ralph Reed on our side. I think we
> > should simply begin to ignore the idiots who can't tell the difference
> > between hard coalition work with all that can be united
>
> Funny, that so open-minded a person can only call someone who opposes her views an
> idiot and only think of Ralph Reed as a Christian? Ever heard of Oscar Romero,
> Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King? Yes, all Christians--no doubt idiots from your way
> of thinking. Why don't you come out of your ivory tower and spend some time with
> people who have real lives and real tragedies?
>
> Why can't socialists of your ilk think of something more imaginitive and creative
> than trite sophisms when discussing religion?
>
> chuck miller
>
>