LH,

I think people confuse religious belief with justification for how others ought to make decisions. This springs mostly from the very active and successful PR campaign of the RRR (Rigid Religious Right) to appear to promulgate religion when what they are really promoting is political action camouflaged under a thin veneer of belief. Or sometimes they're doing the reverse-- it's actually just a shell-game but people fall for it all the time.

I don't think they're afraid to admit what they don't know-- IMO they just are so urgent about their politics that they use religion to justify them. Lefties do it too-- use values to justify action-- but a little less effectively in recent times, so it's the righties that get the attention.

And it all turns on mutual negativity.

Mutual positivity can actually be sparked from ANY belief system, and can be quite compelling with far more return and far less effort than negativity.

Another frequently-made assumption that is just not correct is that theists and humanists are opposite and therefore mutually exclusive and therefore in opposition. First, even if the first two parts of that chain-assumption were correct, it would not logically have to follow that the end conclusion is true, because people are smarter than whatever conditioning they can be whipped into evincing.

But each link in that chain is factually erroneous. Example: I started as a radical humanist, by most people's standards. I am, now, also a believer. I have not had to fudge at ALL on the humanist core beliefs I brought to that experience of faith, not do I find any reason to fudge on the religious side in order to accommodate the humanist orientation. I am truly both theist and humanist, in equal balance.

Yet both humanists and theists have, in many instances, seen only an enemy where in fact they have a potential friend, and a tireless and creative strategist, to boot.

Under the negativity there is usually urgency. When people zoom out a tad on their upsets, the world is much more handle-able.

Someone asked me recently what are my thoughts about some of the well-publicized upsets among churches in the Anglicanm Communion. I wrote a long and I hope helpful reply, but the short answer would have been that tonight as every Wednesday in Lent, our area parishes will get together in fellowship for a Lenten meal and brief worship. We have icy mountains between us in the wonter, even an "easy" winter. We all look forward to the Lenten series and are eager to be together.

The food and the liturgy are the same week after week, whether hosted by the most conservative parish in the bunch or the most liberal-- because one benefit from the Anglican approach can be that we can choose to focus on our commonalities and relationships rather than on our politics-- whether they be church-politics of worldly-politics. But then, we're rural folk-- we know that when the house catches fire, it will be the neighborly volunteer who drives the fire truck or passes the buckets of water from the creek. Politics don't enter into THAT.

~Susan