Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Is that good or bad? Do secular leftists make a big mistake by not
> taking religion more seriously?
Two points have also been made over and over and over and over and over and over and no one ever seems to acknowledge them.
1. Secular leftists do and always have taken religion very seriously indeed -- and have always succeeded in relating to religious people. This has been my personal experience -- and it has been the personal experience of every activist I have ever talked to.
2. This is a matter of practice, and is endlessly reposed and resolved in practice. There is neither any need to theorize it nor is it possible to. Working with religious people is like kneading bread -- one must learn it in one's fingertips as it were. Theory doesn't help.
I'm neither going to teach anyone on LBO how to relate to religious people in practice nor am I going to learn anything from anyone on LBO on that point. Whenever I find a leftist worrying about how to relate to religious people, or worrying about how other leftists might relate to them, I assume I am talking to someone whose experience does not extend beyond fellow leftists. This is a problem that exists only in people's heads, not in actuality, and it is precisely in people's heads that it cannot be either solved or even formulated accurately.
Carrol