>Absolutely. An old time activist in Ann Arbor once told me that the only
>people could absolutely rely on were the Quakers and the commies. ANd the
>"Quakers" of any stripe do not insist or even expect that others will share
>their theology, although the do expect it to be treated respectfully, which
>doesn''t mean uncritically.
yes, in my experience Quakers require almost nothing in terms of accommodating their beliefs, sorry, faith, when you work with them. i'm not sure whether i should be expected to bear a grudge or a bias, given that my father is a quaker, but i think in general even if they're not cool with you ignoring their religion they try to fake being cool about it. and i have never had a quaker try to convert me (though it has occurred to me that that may itself be an insidious process of trying to convert me)
>>Revolutoinaries and progressives have
> *no* reason whatever to dabble with Xtian thought.
hmm not sure who wrote this but a truckload of foundations for what we think of as critical, progressive, etc, are entwined with the christian. including some of what justin goes on to say here. messy, uneven relationship, what isn't? -- but it seems bizarre to me that anyone would make this blanket statement. at the very least it depends on context. on what you're revolting against, with, in relation to... etc.
>Marxist anti-religiosity is a hangover from the Enlightenment's aggressive
>atheism, when "free thought" was radical in itself. Going backa bit, in
>Milton's time, "atheist" had a lot of the force of "communist" in our time
up
>to the end of the cold war. Hobbes was anathamized as an atheist, probably
>rightly (and wrote a great chunck of Leviathan which no one now reads to
talk
>around that stuff); Spinoza the same, probably wrongly, as least as Spinoza
>understood God. In the rural South "free thought" may still be ipso facto
>radical, but in industrialized areas of North America and Europe it's not
any
>more.
>
>Actually there is another reason for a Marxist who is not a convinced
atheist
>to do theology, which is that in Latin America there is still a powerful
>current of liberation theology that is both Marxist and Christian. Michael
>Lowy, a Brazilain Marxist who lives in France, has written a lot on this.
catherine