Yeah, Chuck. It's not the various doctrins. It's how people live it (or not).
The public concience is entertaining some very interesting discussion on the topic just lately. Jimmy Carter has broken w/ the longstanding tradition of former presidents not criticizing sitting presidents. He's an old guy, and seems to be a sincere, compassionate and level headed man. Evidently, he think's it's so important for us to examine the fundamentalist zealotry in today's politics that he's written a book on the topic and has been doing the book tour thing like a much younger man. As I recall (which is not much, cause I was very young when he was prez) he has always demonstrated a pretty nifty understanding that force of law and other types of coersion are the worst, the last resort, to achieving a compassionate, moral society. He took a non coersion stand on marijuana and still does so, to some extent, even on issues as deeply rooted as abortion.
There's a difference between sincere religious conviction and a manifest desire to live up to a high moral standard and the pervasive manifest desire to blugeon others into acting on one's own religious beliefs.
The man in this story pretty clearly demonstrated a militant and irrational desire to control the his brother's behavior. Sorry, folks. I wish that, instead of jumping out of a moving car the dude had come to realize he was going about things the wrong way. But he didn't. And, given a choice between someone like that taking his evolutionary lumps and his living on to impose his militant brand of religion on non-consenting others, this is better. By far and away, much better. And it's a cautionary tale to others who might otherwise make the same mistake.
Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary,
categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.
--Abbie Hoffman
