Scheer on Role of Religion

I applaud Robert Scheer’s bold search (Commentary, March 5) for specks of common sense and reason in the religious and political oceans of madness that abound in America and around the world. It is brutally clear, however, that no one seems to win arguments from the murky depths of either.

The history of civilization has left us with a clear and present view of the horrors thrust upon unsuspecting societies and innocent people by religious fanatics and political tyrants with abandoned and malignant hearts. Yet the meaning of the extremes between them is thinly veiled when compared with savage barbarism. The enigma has always been that religion created the morals and values of greater civilized societies, while at the same time, devastating others.

Mixing politics and religion is an impasse at best, and at worst becomes a recipe for death and destruction.

If we’ve learned anything from history of humankind, it is that religion’s role is to inform the willing, not to injure or inflame the unwilling, and to remain within itself and be left alone to its own purpose, as long as it does not unreasonably infringe upon the lives of those who would rather not embrace it.

DANIEL B. JEFFS

Apple Valley

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* It’s bad enough Scheer accuses the Christian Coalition of steering candidates into the pursuit “of the most cynical of secular goals.”

But accusing candidates opposed to special rights for homosexuals as “bashing gays” is libelous. Gay-bashing is violence, not speech.

Religions need not tolerate but dictate good and bad in a world that tolerates the bad and accuses the good of intolerance.

MITCH TWERSKY

Culver City