Democrats need a Religious Left

Oh... and qvatlanta, too. How'd I miss him when listing others in the room? Sorry 'bout that!

Glad we could help ya' outta' th' closet, there, brutha!

Er... except... um... maybe not so much. Don't plan to attend any Meetings just yet. It might be more likely if that "Orthodox Quaker" of yours were up right around where your "neo-pagan(ism)" happened to fall!



[kiddin' around]

 

Remember that there's a fairly wide spectrum of belief and practice among Friends.

Not all fit the silent (sic) meeting/"Unitarians with laryngitis"*
(self)-caricature. (FGC, some FUM, Conservative, most Unaffiliated)

The majority of Friends use an order of service (programmed worship) similar to a simple mainline Protestant service minus creeds and sacraments. (most of FUM, Evangelical Friends)

*This was the punchline from a joke told me by an FGC recorded minister who was p.o.'d at what she called the hippie-Trappist misconception of unprogrammed worship.

 

I'd call that a description of a 'true believer'. I've always felt that true-believers of both the left and the right share similarities in common, and can both be distinguished from independents and swing voters. Straight ticket voters vs. mavericks and free thinkers.

Theravada is the 'Southern' Buddhism prevalent in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. It differs from Mahayana prevalent in Northern Asia by sticking rather closely to the Pali Canon and by generally rejecting the many subsequent elaborations found in the Mahayana Sutras, Tantras and later developments. It treats the Buddha as a human being (albeit of an exalted sort) and doesn't engage in docetism. It doesn't posit a whole assortment of heavenly Buddhas and Boddhisattvas, and it's less apt to emphasize some Advaita-style ultimate Buddha-nature. It doesn't stress salvation through faith like some Mahayana Buddhists do (Shinran almost sounds like Luther sometimes), and it's less prone to elaborate philosophical speculations.

I've devoted a lot of effort to thinking about religious ideas over the years, so I'm already well aware of those basic issues that I find especially important or troubling. I'm also fully aware of those issues that I seldom think about, at least in a religious context. It's not hard to assign weights on that basis.

Another word for 'ultimate reality', at least when it's personified and treated as if it were a giant human being, is 'God'. Another word for 'destiny of the self' might be 'salvation', I guess. I didn't use the familiar Christian terms, because I don't really think of these things in the familiar Christian ways. But the issues themselves are basic to what I conceive religion to be, at least in my own life.

You express quite a bit of anger there. So even if you abstractly think that these shouldn't be fundamental religious issues, these things do draw an emotional response. So they would have to be weighted highly in that respect at least.

I do find it kind of peculiar that you say that you do this because the religious right somehow compels you do it. That makes your own religiosity sound kind of reactive to me. Perhaps that's not what you meant.

But if that's going to be the motivation for a 'religious left', then it is almost doomed from the start. There has to be something more positive behind it than visceral opposition to the 'religious right'.

I persist in thinking that there may be a basic deep-down similarity between the religious left and the religious right. Both of them are going to weight the socio-politial questions rather highly, with the only difference being the specific answers they happen to give.

So you will see conservatives taking an anti-abortion stand for religious reasons, and you will see liberals taking an anti-capital-punishment stand based on equally religious intuitions. Conservatives may support prayer in the schools, liberals may conduct prayer vigils in behalf of the homeless. But both sides are translating their strongly held religious feelings into public policy.

Compare that to those who conceptualize these social issues in a more secular fashion, people who may apply some kind of utilitarian analysis to them perhaps.

I'm not sure if I understand your point.

Are you saying that while you give the social issues great weight, what you feel so strongly about is leaving them open as matters of individual conscience?

Assuming that's right, I can sympathize with it. I guess where we differ is the degree of religious importance that we ascribe to it.

When liberal clergymen demand government programs for street bums, why don't we have not only a political right, but also a moral right, to just say 'screw'em'? The response would obviously be 'that's inhumane, that's unfeeling, that's simply wrong!'. But isn't that moralistic response really just as judgemental as any Bible-waving fundamentalist preacher on a roll?

The 'right' is just a large and amorphous blob, just like the 'left'. Both are coalitions, composed of people who happen to side together at election time, often very uneasily.

But yeah, there is clearly a significant group on the right whose politics is strongly influenced by the religious weight that they give the social issues.

Wouldn't that reduce religion to some kind of Marxist-style ideology? Would religion-as-social-motivator really address people's innermost religious needs?

I guess that returns us to the stuff about ultimate reality and the destiny of the self. God and salvation aren't just optional extras for many religious believers.

 

I just don't think a utilitarian analysis CAN be made when it comes to many social issues. In some cases it's definitely necessary, but in other cases almost impossible. I could use a far-fetched example that hopefully would not differentiate conservatives and liberals, religious and atheists. Let's say a study was made that determined dogs and cats were useless to the economy, and that they drained more resources than the pet food industry created (this would be false I'm sure, but let's just say it happened). The utilitarian analysis was then applied such that everyone had to turn in their dogs and cats to be destroyed. This would result in all kinds of horrible problems and wide-scale revolt because of people's emotional attachments to their pets. In cases like this, even if you come up with a utilitarian analysis you couldn't apply it unless a large majority of the population already held utilitarian principles. For many present-day social issues a pragmatic utilitarian approach is doomed to failure... it would have to be projected far into the future.