On religion -- its potential and its foibles

Two quite different perspectives are offered here:

• A new site called Faith in Public Life would like to help reclaim the legacy of the liberal faith tradition (i.e., the driving force behind the Civil Rights era and many antiwar efforts) from its distortion in the hands of right wing. From their email:

  Faith in Public Life is committed to ensuring religious voices for justice and the common good are included, heard and respected in any national discourse about public policy. ... Our aim at Faith in Public Life is to ensure that those who use religion as a tool of division and exclusion do not dominate public discourse.

  They also appear to be one of several organizers of the first ever Progressive Faith Blog Conference to be held July 14-16 just outside New York city, to look at faith, blogging, public life, and the intersection of all of the above. (I read a bunch of those folks, so am torn about missing it, although my summer is already packed.)
  
  
• Meanwhile, an essay (actually interview) that goes completely the other way -- not toward the right, but away from faith, arguing that the very presence of religion in society is detrimental to our way of thinking and interacting: Why Religion Must End. Color me among those unwilling to just drop a large portion of my belief system for utilitarian reasons, but also of the rare subset that think that much of my internal morality system and world view would remain intact should I choose to dissociate from organized religion. It's hard not to agree with some of the points made here, e.g.:

  [T]his whole style of believing and talking about beliefs leaves us powerless to overcome our differences from one another. We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.

  Some may find the tone flip, but I think it raises serious questions that people of all (or no) faiths need to wrestle with -- I recommend reading the whole thing.
  (via kottke)