>>>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
>
>Isn't this a bit euro-centric? Are you saying that only Europeans with a
>xtian
>background can become true progressives? No marxists in Japan, China,
>India, Indonesia except those whose parents converted to xtianity?
no of course not by a truckload i mean a significant amount, not all by a long shot sorry i don't enumerate as precisely as most of you and by we yeah for sure i mean western culture i don't feel at all equipped to we with reference to anyone else
>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.
>
>I'm not "revolting against anything" -- that is what late 20th century
>teenagers do.
Hah, don't get me started so what should the active verb for revolutionaries be then just so i get it right...
>Incidentally, I'm a skilled Christian theologian, not
>because I ever had any interest in Christianity (I'm an atheist by
>birthright more than merit) but because I spent years of my life
>studying Milton and his critics, and a student of PL & PR has
>to be a theologian even if she/she is an atheist who thinks religion
>boring.
well i hope you're not one of the folks into psychoanalysis here
>...As remarked above, I have "done" an awful lot of theology, and as
>remarked
>in my preceding post, I have worked with Christians politically for 35
>years --
>but I *never* had to call on my deep knowledge of xtian theology in
>order
>to do that political work. Some of my closest comrades in Bloomington
>are
>"liberation theologists," but in practice they are merely for
>liberation and
>one does not need the theology to work with them.
>
>Working politically with xtians simply has no connection with knowing or
>
>being interested in xtian thought, any more than working politically
>with
>chess players has any connection with being a chess player.
well i don't usually think of chess as being a set of beliefs about the world and how it should be. maybe i'm wrong there. but the questions of religious belief/activity seems more closely related to political belief/activity than chess playing. i guess i don't see chess as a belief system or a set of social goals. maybe that's why my chess game is deteriorating.
>My non-christianity has the same basis as my non-olympianism or my
>non-shintoism. Christianity, Olympianism, and Shintoism are all false
>theories.
hah and hah again. now if you believe you can call me on eurocentrism above at least you'd never call me on this kind of farcical transculturalism does olympianism or shintoism have a comparable weight to christianity in your social and political contexts?
>Liberation theology, incidentally, has its source not in theology but in
>
>the actual liberation movements of latin america -- when christians
>turn radical they simply twist their theology around to fit their
>politics.
this seems to me highly dubious
>I doubt that anyone ever abstractly deduced progressive politics
>from xtian thought -- because christian thought has been reactionary
>from the very beginning. Read G.E.M. de Ste. Croix. That in the last
>few centuries so many xtians have been progressive or revolutionary
>is simply evidence of the artificiality of religious belief. As soon as
>the believer encounters an interesting reality, she/he grasps it and
>adapts the theology to fit the reality.
you should have been reading blake rather than milton
catherine