No matter how long I take, how hard try to research it, organize, it, write it, it’ll always be inadequate. So maybe the best way to write this blog is to just copy the post I just wrote swept up by the moment to Faryarm (a Bahai) on my “Imagine a World Without War!” blog on folk singer Buffy Ste. Marie. (As most of you know I am not a Bahai, I have no particular creed at all).
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To Faryarrm:
thanks, I have some thoughts going on in my head…
two articles I keep thinking about that overlap–Bahaullah and Secularism, and When Nothing is Sacred Except the Secular. I feel Bahaullah is completely misunderstood, his vision is perfectly compatible with the Secular Enlightenment. He was one of the greatest minds of the 19th century anywhere, basically going around trying to get a League of Nations set up decades BEFORE Europe had to go blow itself up before they started one.
Then this website, jj is a pacifist, green, :soft left”etc., etc., his politics very similar to mine, but the EXPLICIT preferernce of secular viewpoints here (all are published but the non-secular are tolerated rather than celebrated, this has been suggested by him in various ways in blogs, even explicitly,to my concern) is a betrayal of our mentors in the peace movement worldwide: the Quakers, Gandhi, Dr. King being the most famous. These were people of deep faith. They could NOT have moved the mountains they did without the language of faith to inspire others. That is the language of spirituality and poetry. You can be an ATHEIST but you need the language of faith to move mountains.
I feel our language is getting ousted here. I feel it is being restricted to literature and art threads. I feel during the days of the “Wild Wild West” due to all the passions and authenticity running around hand in hand with the hate, there was more of a place for the spiritual and poetic voices on the political threads. And people actually heard us sometimes.
I feel we are getting ostracized from these threads. I feel without our language all is lost.
