checking out the library book / Love - massively OT, mostly

[Barry Arrowsmith]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> wrote:
> Um, actually my religion  doesn't presuppose belief
> in a god. In fact it positively forbids belief in most gods. 
> It certainly presupposes the existence of God, in 
> much the same way that physics presupposes the 
> existence of gravity, but no one is commanded to believe. 
>
> Nonetheless it has traditions of worship and spirituality. 
> I believe there are other traditional religions, such as Buddhism,
> which also wouldn't fit your definition.
> 

Kneasy:
Egregious nit-picking of the worst kind. 
Your religion has a god - whether you personally choose to distinguish
it by means of a capital letter is beside the point.

And inaccurate to  boot.
Buddhism holds that the world is a transient reflex *of the deity*;
that the soul is a vital spark *of the diety*.

> 
> Your thesis that medieval England wasn't a religious nation 
> because its religious institutions had purposes other than 
> fostering belief in the Christian God rings rather hollow to me
> since Jews weren't allowed to participate in those institutions;
> in fact they were for many centuries banned from the country,
> despite  simliar social and moral standards.
>

Kneasy:
Again a specious argument. 
The phrase was "not particularly religious" - it was part of the
background of society but not its determinant. If the forms of
religion don't provide or allow for that which is needed, change them. 
Which of course they did a few centuries later; but the seeds were
sown much earlier, as many a letter from Papal Legates to the Vatican
attest.
Religion must meet the needs of society, not the other way round,
seems to have been the decisive local argument.

I fail to see how medieval Jewry has anything to do with the
practical uses to which a nunnery could be put.

The English of the time didn't like *anyone* who wasn't English,
Christian or not. (Is that why the villains in HP have foreign names?)
Johnson again - 
"English anti-clericalism was, of course merely one important 
branch of English xenophobia. Hostility to foreigners is one of 
the most  deep-rooted and enduring characteristics of the English;
like the national instinct for violence, it is a genuine popular force,
held only in check (if at all) by the most resolute discipline, 
imposed against the public will, by authoritarian government acting
in enlightened self-interest. [...] Tolerance has only been imposed 
in the teeth of their resistance. [...] One might say that much of
the history of England has been a conflict between xenophobia and 
avarice, with the latter usually in the end, getting the upper hand.
[...] it is a process which requires a contempt for logic, a degree of 
self-deception and often bare-faced hypocrisy, with all of which the
English are richly endowed."