<div>On 3/5/06, Carrol Cox <<a href="mailto:cbcox@ilstu.edu">cbcox@ilstu.edu</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Jeffrey Fisher wrote: > [clip] >  but the shift for me was never one of the scales falling from my eyes > (per saint paul). it was much more gradual than that and, loooking > back on it, was much more about getting things done. "More about getting things done" seems to me a nearly perfect description of the practice. And that brings us back to marxism as a set of tools for understanding and acting in the world rather than a belief system to which one owes allegiance. </blockquote><div> absolutely. i have always objected to and been irritated by introductory texts on religion that insist on lumping "humanism" and/or "marxism"/"communism" in with religions, but the objection may be a bit disingenuous for precisely the reason you're mentioning. i don't see marxism as a religion to which i owe allegiance, and the use of capital or whatever for me is much more like reading plato (or derrida ;-) than like reading something i consider scripture. but there are people who latch onto communism or marx in precisely a religious way. i would rather that not be the case, but wish doesn't make it not so. </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">The core of xtianity, it seems to me, is that belief in itself is the highest good (Whosoever believeth in me etc), and I put no stock whatever in belief as an end in itself. </blockquote></div> if we could amend that to read, "the core of certain forms of xtianity", i would be happy to sign on. xtianity is in my view no more *essentially* fideocentric than islam is *essentially* violent or terrorist. there's a lot of bible and there are lots of ways of reading the bible. j -- "lo que decimos no siempre se parece a nosotros"