On the Destructive Pretensions and Posturings of Purists — While So Much Needs to Be Done to Change the World for Better

It's the militant atheism that so easily gloms together with the militant anti-Catholicism, both perfectly mirroring militant Catholicism and evangelicalism, that should give us pause to think:

Especially when it claims to be pure, to be leading us to a purer, more rational and scientific and rights-oriented world — which it hopes to build without any sympathy for or solidarity with many groups who are actually working for that better world, not a few of them motivated by redemptive understandings of their religious faith.

These are people who do not have time to waste in trying to weed out the impure and shine up their credentials to be the most self-righteous folks in the world. 

They're the people who walked across Edmund Pettus bridge knowing that the billysticks were waiting there to break their heads — and who kept walking. Together. Because they were moved by redemptive religious conviction that led them to undertake that walk together even knowing they'd be injured and perhaps killed for what they chose to do.

God save us from the pure, the self-righteous, with their disdain for all lesser human beings who do not have the option of militant orthodoxy that so attracts the purists of all stripes, causing the militant atheist and the militant anti-Catholic to be perfect mirrors of the very thing they claim to abhor, militant Christianity.