Half the world's workers and their families live on less than $2 a day. Even Voltaire himself would have found it difficult to find enlightenment on the equivalent of such a low income in his day. :-> Today, most secular leftists do not propose that such absolute poverty can, will, or should be abolished or that North-South gaps can, will, or should be closed, let alone all exploitation and oppression be ended. (Those who still do have no idea how.) That is the reality. Facing the real absence of any worldly project of human liberation, not surprisingly, many turn to religions, which do offer many powerful narratives of liberation necessary for the poor's political struggle and provide a lot of useful services that secular leftists (unless they are in possession of state power) cannot and will not provide.
> But if you want
> to see the vast majority of nonfanatical but religious
> Americans abandon unsupportable beliefs (the least of
> the problems with religion) and build communities
> based on reality,
It is possible that the main distinction between Americans who are part of religious organizations and Americans who are not part of them is not the degree of religious faith but the degree of ability to build -- and enjoy building -- enduring communities and community institutions. Secular Americans who say they have "no religion" may very well be still full of illusions, idealist or materialist, but moreover may also be individualists whose temperament makes it difficult for them to build communities based on anything. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>