Brad McCormick wrote:
> > The debates that the CSM refers to
> > are about unconstitutional activities and dangers of certain religious
> > splinter groups rather than about the relations between religions and
> > secularism in general.
>
> When the new pope was being elected, the 3 main
> concerns the cardinals were addressing, according to one
> commentator associated with the RCS, were: (1) internal
> church governance, (2) relations between the Roman Church and
> Islam, and (3) secularism, especially in Europe -- the commentator
> even used a term I found evocative: he said Europe was
> increasingly "post religious".
Of course the vatican itself is absorbed with the relations between religion
and secularism (because that is what is making the vatican sink), but I was
talking about the public discourse in Europe, which has different much more
urgent problems -- precisely because Europe is "post religious".
> > In this sense it's also strange that the CSM
> > article omits Judaism in its first phrase: "Across Europe, the
> > conflicting currents of secularism, Christianity, and Islam
>
> How big an issue is Judaism today, compared with
> "secularism, Christianity, and Islam"? The article did not
> mention Bahai, Buddhism, TM, The Unification Church,
> Hinduism or a number of other religions, either....
How big an issue is the "Jewish state" in the all-encompassing "War on
Terror" and the issue of Islamists ? I would reckon that Bahai, Buddhism
etc. are pretty irrelevant for that, but not Judaism. But perhaps the CSM
left this out because nobody has to mention the elephant in the livingroom.
> I would argue that the most important thing is not
> what religion persons happen to believe in, but whether
> they think they should judge themselves and others by the
> dictates of that religion (George Bush, Osama bin Laden,
> the Pope, et al.), or whether they should judge
> the tenets of that religion (including its Deity/ies, etc./et al.)
> according to their own and others'
> rational deliberations (the idea of
> Europe, and of any other self-reflectively self-accountable
> beings there may be in the universe and in history...).
As an expert on zionism (Rabbi Meir Kahane) put it:
"Democracy and Zionism cannot go together.
Western democracy has to be ruled out.
In a religious state, there can be no [freedom of speech]."
This should make us think about the implications of zionist influence
on Dubya and his fellow armageddonists. (PNAC, AIPAC etc.)
"Yours in discourse...."
Chris
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