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[saltpoint]

51. I spoke in support of trotsky's posts on

this site.

I invoke Forster in matters of belief / nonbelief / etc. He suggests that there is more than one path through the wilderness, that by and large people are overwhelmed by their own paths to acknowledge others' paths, but that in certain all too rarte ideal circumstances, the trick is to help someone else through the wilderness.

I have long respected in trotsky's posts here the mind of someone who is reflexively distrustful of dusty institutional thought, and who has the depth and range to gird his criticisms of those institutions.

The Catholic Church is not the only bully but it has done its share of bullying, most certainly. The responsibility to examine why this is so should fall primarily on the Church itself -- that church and others and other institutions generally -- to determine what individuals' relationship to power should be.

In Europe in the Second World War, one did not storm into a Gestapo office, slam one's fist on the front desk, and demand that they cease their atrocities visited against innocent citizens. If one did that, one would likely find one's ass in a freight car bound for Dachau within the half-hour.

Yet still, a conscionable person would not tolerate the presence and daily practice of the Gestapo, and could, bravery allowing, connect with the Underground, active in many European cities at the time, as a gesture against the violence, as a refusal to tolerate the intolerable.