nader, as far as i know, was or is for some basic human rights. These rights, i affirm, can be best and most quickly obtained via a political party.
no, no org, cult, or movement wld do.
any socalled religion to earn that label must be first of all henotheistic. And have only very few dogmas if any. No dogma is even better.
but major cults such as islam, et al, promise[read lie], command, spread hatred/intolerance, etc., too much.
and we humans are notorious for not learning from coommands and a priori creeds.
we learn only thru experience; using langauge as auxilliary tool.
to know an apple one must taste, smell, touch it. No amount of verbiage will impart the knowledge of an apple, god, saint, moshiach, mahdi, jesus, vapor, snake, spoon, etc.
to most clergy, theory [cart before horse] is all; experience means nothing or is less reliable. However, the theoretical knowledge that one “asks god and he will deliver you”, is quickly abandoned when a priest [or even christians] has a heart attack and goes to a doctor and not to any god let alone a saint.
tnx

We must distinguish between Christians and Christinists. Christians, who are damn few and damn far between, actually try to live the teachings of Jesus. Christianists, who are the majority, are driven by orthodoxy and doctrines that have little to do with the teachings of Jesus. It is they who constitute the organized religon that has spread so much misery in the world. A favorite passtime of Christinists is marginalizing Christians.

I stumbled over that, too. Actually, I choked on it. Christianity in any form in anathema to justice, peace, equality, and progress. Religion itself, in any manifestation, is the opposite of those. To their credit, some individuals can and do overcome religious indoctrination to actually do some good in the world. More power to them.

I’m hesitant to use literalism in the way you suggest however. The money-changers story is a good example of this. This story has two meanings, its literal meaning and its symbolic meaning. If you pursue the literal meaning, you’re endorsing a literal interpretation of scripture and therefore perpetuating the misunderstanding of an important message.

On the other hand, you can’t just discard the literal in favour of the symbolic – I don’t think the audience would tolerate it. Somehow, you’ve got to lead them from “Jesus didn’t like money” to “Material wealth is antithetical to spiritual development.” I guess maybe that’s the same sentence in different wording – one set of words for those who are at a particular stage in their development, and another set for those that are a bit further down the path.

Anyhow, I think there’s a place for the Christ myths, and I don’t think the value of the message is deprecated by the fact that it is myth and not history. However, the mormons and jehova’s witnesses that come to my door don’t seem to be swayed by my explanations. They’re a tough crowd that way – they really don’t want to let go of the emotional security provided by the belief in their omnipotent father-figure.

Anyhow, I want to again and sincerely wish you good luck in your efforts.

We need a clarification here. I am a renegade Christian, not a fundamentalist Christian. As such, it is a matter of indifference to me whether Jesus existed or not. What counts is the teaching that has come down to us. I follow the Tao of Jesus and not the dogma that has grown up around him over the centuries.

My point is this: our oligarchs’ favorite strategy is to keep the poor divided by fanning the flames of racism: poor white against poor black against poor hispanic.

The one force that is common to these three groups is a fundamental or conservative faith. So we’d preach, “Yes sir! Jesus is the Way and he showed the way to you when he trashed the money changers in the temple. ”

For a union between socialism and fundamentalism to suceed, we’d have to borrow a page from the Liberation Theology of Latin America with its emphasis on bottom up organization.

The Right Wing Noise Machine is making a lot of headway with the working poor. We could appeal to one thing the right can’t, their faith.

It wouldn’t be easy, but it might be worth a try.

Case, dude. I hope that last sentence was ironic, but just in case…

Jesus was not a real guy. He is an instance of a mythical archetype. His story is an allegory for the evolution of the human spirit from selfishness to selflessness.

The value of the Christ myth is that it helps show us the way to fully realizing our spiritual potential. When you take it literally, you totally miss the point of the myth: you are Christ, and it’s a long and often painful journey from the animal you were born to the angel you could become.

So good luck with that – as a fundamentalist, you’re starting ‘in the hole’ so to speak – you’ll have to first let go of the comforting notion that you have an invisible friend that grants you wishes. If you want to be a good person, do it for its/your own sake, not because you fear that the great beard in the sky might be keeping score.

The Vatican’s objections to Liberation Theology went beyond fear of its Marxist overtones. When Pope Benedict XVI headed up the church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), he wrote “Liberation Theology”, which condemned the practice for reasons other than its Marxist leanings.

He opposed its emphasis on orthopraxis over orthodoxy (practice over theory) because it undermined the “correct and ecclesial theology” of the church.

He objected to its bottom-up organization that consisted of base communities that were formed outside of the organized church because he saw this as a threat to the church’s orthodox hierarchy.

Finally, he condemned the painting Jesus as an activist radical who bumped heads with the hierarchy of his day because it challenges the church’s orthodox Christology.

To deny that Jesus was a radical, one has to ignore the overturned tables and scattered coins left in the wake of His sojourn through the temple. Jesus took on Jerusalem’s temple cult that had the Judaism of His day in its grip. Take away this radicalism and we are left with a blond, blue-eyed milksop who cuddled baby lambs and suffered the children to come unto him.

For that matter, strip Liberation Theology of its Marxism and bottom-up praxis, and all that remains is a church that sheds crocodile tears over the poor while supporting the hierarchy that suppresses them.

I have always contended that Socialism in this country will go nowhere until it embraces the one force that unites America’s Euromerican, Afromerican and Latinomerican poor and working poor: Christian fundamentalism.

Of course, we’d have to lose our ideological prissiness.