On Mar 16, 2007, at 1:22 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> What makes you think that understanding other people's faiths and
> recognizing that some of them are full of great virtues must lead to
> adopting one or many of them as one's own?
Unlike you, I've actually spent some time as a believer - in Catholicism, one of the more baroque and demanding forms of Christianity. I appreciate the lovely art that it inspired, and the traditional mass has moments of great beauty, but it's essentially a bucketload of mumbojumbo. As for the virtues, I'm coming to doubt that religion has much of an independent influence on people's political views; they have the politics dictated by their interests and temperament, and mold their interpretations of religion accordingly. Christianity has been a religion of left, right, center, and the apolitical.
I will say, though, that the prominence of religion has had an unfortunate influence on the American left - religious leftists here are way too likely to presume the good intentions of their enemies, and believe that appeals to their conscience will work. The bourgeoisie will jail and kill people if they feel their power and wealth are threatened, but all those people singing Kumbaya act otherwise.
Doug