You know, if more Xians were more like Bill Moyers, I’d have to lighten up on them a little. He has a talk that’s become the cover piece for the remarkably sensible Sojourners Magazine reminding me that even people with wacky metaphysical views can get some of the moral and poltical issues at least partly right. Some tidbits:

I trace my spiritual lineage back to a radical Baptist in England named Thomas Helwys…. In no small part because of Baptists like Thomas Helwys and other “freethinkers,” the men who framed our Constitution believed in religious tolerance in a secular republic. The state was not to choose sides among competing claims of faith. So they embodied freedom of religion in the First Amendment. Another person’s belief, said Thomas Jefferson, “neither picks my pocket not breaks my bones.” It was a noble sentiment often breached in practice. The Indians who lived here first had more than their pockets picked; the Africans brought here forcibly against their will had more than their bones broken. Even when most Americans claimed a Protestant heritage and practically everyone looked alike, we often failed the tolerance test; Catholics, Jews, and Mormons had to struggle to resist being absorbed without distinction into the giant mix-master of American assimilation…. My friend Elaine Pagels, the noted scholar of religion, says “There’s practically no religion I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms the other’s choice.” You only have to glance at the daily news to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive loyalty to one’s own kin, one’s own clan, one’s own country, and one’s own church…. Religion has a healing side, but it also has a killing side…. In our time alone the litany is horrendous. I keep a file marked “Holy War.” It bulges with stories of Shias and Sunnis in fratricidal conflict. Of teenage girls in Algeria shot in the face for not wearing a veil. Of professors whose throats are cut for teaching male and female students in the same classroom. Of the fanatical Jewish doctor with a machine gun mowing down 30 praying Muslims in a mosque. Of Muslim suicide bombers bent on the obliteration of Jews. Of the young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and then announced to the world that “Everything I did, I did for the glory of God.” Of Hindus and Muslims slaughtering each other in India, of Christians and Muslims perpetuating gruesome vengeance on each another in Nigeria.

Bill Moyers: Almost smart enough to be an atheist. Give it a read: Democracy in the Balance