On Fri, 6 Apr 2007 14:49:26 -0400 "Yoshie Furuhashi"
<critical.montages at gmail.com> writes:
> On 4/6/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Social and religious reasons, to most religious people of the sort
> in
> whom leftists ought to take interest, are one and the same. Only to
> the irreligious do social and religious reasons appear mutually
> exclusive. For the religious worth their name, believing in God,
> worshipping God, sustaining faith, seeking spiritual growth, keeping
> themselves grounded and inspired, etc. can't be solitary activities
What you are writing about sounds more Catholicism than it does like evangelical Protestantism which is the dominant form of religiosity in the US. The evangelicals place their emphasis on the formation of a personal relationship with God/Jesus. It's a highly individualistic form of religion, in contrast with the communitarianism of Catholicism. In theory, once you have established a personal relationship with God, the social aspects of religion become secondary. This of course fits very handily with the dominant political ideologies of the US.
> --
> they are communal activities. Similarly, anarchism, socialism, and
> other secular faiths are only truly meaningful in communities of
> fellow believers. Solitary anarchists, socialists, etc. are
> essentially oxymorons, though some socialists, anarchists, etc. are
> temperamentally anti-social to the detriment of themselves and their
> faiths.
>
>