Secular leftists also need to drop their dogmatic attitude: the tendency to dismiss any views on the subject of the religious, even those presented by those who have expert knowledge that they lack, as "apologia" defending this or justifying that, as soon as they contradict the views they already hold or correct misinformation found in doxa. If that's the way you go about it, you can't learn anything from anyone who doesn't agree with you, and conversations become only tedious. For us to have a productive discussion, we have to make an elementary distinction between description and explanation on one hand and justification on the other hand. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>