On Oct 23, 2007, at 2:29 PM, BklynMagus wrote:
>> How do we as mostly secular leftists relate to
> religiously minded people, such as militant
> Islamists who might be engaged in anti-imperialist
> struggle?
>
> We support them in their shared identification of
> a great threat, in this case, imperialist activity.
Yeah. On a related topic, Adolph Reed wrote me recently:
> On the religion thing, I've never pretended -- in nearly 40 years of
> organizing work with working class black and white people, many in
> the South
> -- to be at all religious; nor have I forced myself to pander a
> syllable in
> all that time, partly out of principle, partly because my disdain
> for the
> enterprise is so thorough. I've not once found my approach to cause
> me any
> problems connecting with people, not even most recently at the SC flea
> markets. I've consistently found that, if you talk with people
> honestly and
> directly about the stuff they're concerned about when they get up
> in the
> morning and go to bed at night, Jesus just doesn't come up. And,
> when the
> issue is forced, most people will respond the correct way to
> formulations
> like "What's more important to you -- what someone else worships or
> doesn't,
> or whether you can get health care?"
> Some answer the wrong way, of course, but it's a waste of time to
> try to
> convince them, and many more don't need that kind of convincing.