> 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.
Ah Milton, perhaps that is why your contempt for anything smacking of religious belief is so sour. The question is not what you know about theology but what you do. You branded me as a religious right fanatic from some merely benign comments on Yoshie's Freudian fetish. You're the one who got testy, my dear.
> 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.
Wonderful, so there is ecumenism among atheists. ... Or is it because you would kill each other that you cannot speak rationally about your differences of opinion? The only reason to bring up religion is to overcome in some way the hatreds it arouses against others. I think dodging the issue altogether is false in some way. Religion obviously means something to both of you--to not even confront the issue seems dishonest. It seems patronizing. Like your views are so obviously wrong I don't even think they're worthy of discussion and debate.
I have had very strong debates with atheists whom I did not come to hate afterwards. I even think they came to see why I believe the way I do. Isn't it that kind of debate and discussion that we must have before we can begin to oversome some of the very difficult situations that present themsleves in a truly multicultural and diverse community?
> 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.
Human survival is certainly better off for all the Gulags, concentration camps, and reeducation camps put up by the atheist political types. Why does it always seem that the atheist left is so bereft of a sense of tragedy?
> 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.
And what leftists are those? Many Leftist Christians I know are quite decent folks. So are some of the atheist leftists I know. But I imagine being an atheist does not commit you to be kind to people, as would being a Christian leftist. Were those Christian leftists who ran the Gulags or atheist leftists? In Guatemala, I understand, 80 percent of the atrocities against the Indians were committed by the army and only 20 percent by the leftists. That was a Chrisitan leftist who died for telling it that way...
> 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.
WHO are you talking about? THE left is in disarray for all kinds of reasons, not just out of self-hate. In America, it is hard to fight good times. People just don't believe that things are as bad the leftists say it is. You have to have a lot of faith to see that the prosperity and good times are happening on the back of the Third World and that all that middle-class debt has to come back to haunt us some day.
> 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.
Working with people in prison and with water issues here are only some of the things I am dealing with. The key issue is why a state that gave Intel $533M in tax cuts gets to be the poorest state in the nation. People don't want to believe it is the rich who are getting richer at their expense, but the facts are quite clear. At the same time, the state is almost half Hispanic/half Anglo, and so wrongs along ethnic lines are used to divert people's attention away from the real problems.
chuck miller