"Explicitly religious conversations have driven freedom before. They are uniquely capable of doing that today."
. . . "and having forgotten religious discourse we were handicapped in understanding religions well enough to make necessary critical distinctions. Thus, very quickly, when the intolerant apologists for 9/11 reacted to the least critical comment on the beliefs of the attackers by calling it “Islamophobia,” far too few of our cultural leaders knew how to respond with critical truth. As intolerant religionists through the ages have loved to do, even the most worthy of criticism was powerfully repressed in the very nations that al-Qaida and their likes wish to destroy.
"We have learned that lesson less than perfectly. A major party and its president mocked and trivialized American religionists — “bitter clingers” to their guns and Bibles. And now that party, as indicated by recent polls, is liking guns and their application to our politics, excusing or even advocating for violence to change the politics of the country to the way they prefer. And they embrace with almost no criticism whatsoever advocates of religious violence and coercion, those who call for the imposition of religious law with no deference necessary to other religions or the robust and deeply religiously meaningful idea of religious freedom which is our American heritage and the Western heritage.
"New York has elected a mayor who in the heat of his campaign told us that the real take-home image we should have of 9/11 was not the death of 3,000 citizens in New York at the hand of utterly intolerant religionists willing to establish their empire by whatever force necessary. No, no! We should rather make our stand, moved to tears by his painful simulation of genuine emotion, with an alleged relative of his who, in his telling, was fearful to ride the subway because she wore a hijab. Following the rules of the intolerance of the movements the mayor-elect fails to condemn, she had an expectation of some kind of angry reaction to her because of the slaughter executed by co-religionists." . . .More...
