Religious friends. Trying to defend you here against some Bill Maher types who are telling me that religion has literally never done anything good and that all religious people are deluded, that religion has failed mankind. Honestly, I dont know why Im wasting my time on this, the response is so obvious. But help me expand this list of really awesome religious people, most of whom were pretty dang progressive and intelligent. Im just on the world-famous Christians and Buddhists. @Michael Yosef Miller: help me list some Jews here who werent just culturally Jewish -- I wish I knew more about Judaism. _____________ Do you enjoy the work of any of these people? Then you are enjoying the work of intelligent religious people. And were not even talking about the nameless women and men who are working anonymously and under the media radar: -- Stephen Colbert (Catholic Sunday school teacher) -- J.R.R. Tolkien (pre-Vatican II Catholic, considered Lord of the Rings as Christian allegory) -- Martin Luther King, Jr. (Minister and activist) -- Mahatma Gandhi (led one of the only successful liberation movements of the 20th century, because it was non-violent) -- Nelson Mandela (ditto) -- Dalai Lama (Buddhist monk and peace activist, Nobel Peace Prize winner) -- Thich Nhat Hanh (Buddhist monk and peace activist) -- Thomas Merton (Catholic monk and peace activist) -- Robert F. Kennedy (Progressive Catholic) -- Dorothy Day (founder of the Catholic Worker Movement) -- William Wilberforce (Evangelical founder of the Anti-Slavery movement) -- John Brown (anti-slavery activist) -- Bartolomé de las Casas (Monk, saint, and defender of Native Americans) -- Flannery OConnor (Catholic Southern writer, extremely popular) -- Emily Dickinson (poet, extremely religious) -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (Unitarian minister) -- Henry David Thoreau (sat on Walden pond reading a bunch of Hindu and Christian books) -- Johann Sebastian Bach (super religious, arguably greatest composer who ever lived) -- W.A. Mozart (Catholic) -- Leo Tolstoy (radical Christian back-to-the-lander) -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Christian existentialist Russian novelist) -- Søren Kierkegaard (Christian existentialist philosopher) -- Galileo Galilei (extremely devout Catholic even after the Church ripped him) -- Gregor Mendel (father of modern genetics, Benedictine monk) -- Georges LeMaitre (Jesuit priest, physicist, father of Big Bang Theory) -- Dante Alighieri (Italian poet) -- Michelangelo (Italian artist -- Gerard Manley Hopkins (arguably greatest Victorian poet, Jesuit priest) -- William Blake (spiritualist, Christian) -- William Wordsworth (Christian) -- Czeslaw Milosz (Nobel Prize winning poet, Catholic) -- Bono (Evangelical?) -- Johnny Cash (Christian) -- Bob Dylan (born Jewish, went Christian, pissed off his followers because he sang Gospel) -- Bob Marley (Rastifarian-Christian?) -- Jimmy Carter (Southern Baptist, Nobel Peace Prize winner) -- John F. Kennedy (Catholic) -- Abraham Lincoln (Christian, famous opponent of slavery) -- Many other notable opponents of slavery: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_opponents_of_slavery -- Oscar Romero (priest, opponent of American imperialism) -- Mother Theresa (nun, humanitarian, Nobel Prize winner) -- George McGovern (well-known anti-war US presidential candidate) -- Helen Keller (activist for the disabled) -- Sister Helen Prejean (activist for prisoners on death row and minorities) -- Albert Schweitzer (missionary surgeon, music historian, religious historian, Nobel Peace Prize winner) -- Lech Walesa (Solidarity leader in Poland, helped bring down Communism, Catholic) -- Dag Hammarskjöld (UN Secretary General and peace activist, the greatest statesman of our century) -- Francis of Assisi (friend of animals) -- Thomas More (philosopher, hero of conscience) -- John Donne (probably greatest English poet of his time) -- William Shakespeare (arguably greatest playwright ever) -- Charles Dickens (arguably greatest novelist ever) -- J.K. Rowling (great contemporary author) -- Seamus Heaney (probably greatest English-language poet of 20th century) -- Alexander Pope (Catholic) -- Victor Hugo (Catholic, humanitarian) -- Bill Moyers (TV host) -- Wendell Berry (poet, activist, environmentalist) -- Jack Kerouac (conservative Catholic -- look it up -- Beat poet) -- Halldor Laxness (Catholic, Nobel prize winner) -- Johann Gutenberg (inventor of the printing press, which was invented to print Bibles) -- Hildegard von Bingen (medieval female mystic, poet, and scientist) -- Edward Elgar (Catholic English composer) -- Arvo Pärt (Orthodox, probably greatest living classical composer) -- Antonin Dvorak (Catholic) -- John Updike (Christian) -- Richard Gere (Buddhist) -- Alan Watts (Buddhist) -- Gary Snyder (poet, peace activist, American Buddhist) -- Peter Matthiessen (Buddhist) -- Aung San Suu Kyi (human rights activist in Burma, Buddhist, Nobel Peace Prize winner) -- Hugo Chávez (Catholic) -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Christian minister, outspoken opponent of Adolf Hitler, killed by Hitler) -- Buddha (Buddhist) -- Jesus (Christian)
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 16:12:14 +0000