Don’t forget, pre-Enlightenment (the era of the introduction of cause and effect, through knowledge concerning real entities, made possible by microscopes, telescopes, etc….), virtually everyone, for example, believed in witches. In 1692, during the Salem witch business, it was universally accepted, even by, say, Cambridge scholars, that witches were real. That alone made a whole lot of court proceedings possible. We are nuts to even waste time talking about accommodating people who believe in “witches” in this day and age.

Faith in humans is good enough. I have faith that good and evil will be done by humans: I hope for the good and try to work for it. That sustains me.

http://www.truthdig.com/dig/it…..manifesto/

The idea that the Democratic Party should spin its wheels accommodating those who believe in the supernatural is, well, pretty tedious. Those who like believing in the supernatural need to accommodate the real word. Ms Marsh keeps suggesting that “perception is reality.” Rove is choking on his own laughter at that: that is exactly what he sells! As one of the Rovians once said, “while you all are running around dealing with the ‘reality’ we have created, we’ve already moved on to the real agenda. “

If one looks deeply enough there is universality among the major religious and spiritual paths. It is the catholic nature of religion that becomes abstruse when translated through its leaders.

The leaders desire to consolidate power under their particular translation. Thus, the spirituality is marginalized, (the healing and rebirthing aspect of religion,) and what remains is prejudice and intolerance.

As Jesus and Gandhi among others said, “love is the answer,” but so few want to hear it. If one’s experience was without love; his belief is that all experience is without love. People either learn to control their lives with love or nations will control them with tyranny.

One must be tough to love. One must be brave to love, and one must be a bit insane to love, but the alternative is so much worse.

Shakespeare seemed to believe that love was both a type of mental illness as well as a grand beauty in the innocent, a folly for the mature, and a state of grace in the old. I am uncertain if he thought one could be reborn.

Everyone has been wounded, but only some recover from their wounds. A spiritual life helps make this possible. Unfortunately what the radical right wing is selling irritates the wound for selfish reasons. Some democrats understand this and they should not be afraid to say it.

Representing a narrow “keyhole” view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the Hubble Deep Field image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space, because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions. Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500galaxies at various stages of evolution.
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An ‘entity’ capable of creating this would have absoulutely no reason to demand worship.
A person who claims that because he/she worships this ‘entity’ they will be rewarded for doing so is at best delusional, at worst arrogant.

I don’t demand that others not worship that ‘entity’ but I do demand they stop threatening to throw me into a volcano because I won’t use their coping mechanism for dealing with life’s insecurities.

Is there some sort of “War on Religion” from the Democrats that you’re referring to? A “Fight Against the Faithful”? Some sort of “Secular Smackdown”? I’m just wondering, because I appear to be out of the loop on those campaigns, except for the hyperventilating at FOX. I mean, unless you’re saying that they’re right about that. Personally, I think they’re lying, and since Sullivan says the same types of things about a Democrat vs. religion divide, I think she’s lying, too.

At the risk of being labelled anti-religious by the likes of Sullivan, I’ll admit I’m an empiricist. So, got any examples?

You don’t have to believe in God, Buddha or Allah to respect the power, not to mention the practicalities, of reaching out to people of all types of faith.

I agree with you 100 percent there. I was baptized Catholic and that is the extent of my religious affiliations. However, I resent the accusations or implied belief that that automatically makes me hostile to religion, which is flat false.

This is a quiet, but growing movement. Frankly, I think Sullivan is wrong that we need to “court” the evangelical vote. It’s fraying on its own as the evangelicals who actually do read the Good Book take it seriously and realize who really is on their hero’s side. Of course, Dobsons and Falwells were always telling the folks out there in TEEVEE land to read the book but, really, they didn’t MEAN it. Are you kidding? They don’t want you to read it draw your own conclusions about it. They want you to read it with THEIR conclusions already drummed into your head.