If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it's not religion, but you can train through education.
You will notice that the Occupy Wall Street crowds - and the progressives who support them - focus on bringing the wealthy down to earth rather than lifting the 99 percent. They have a nearly religious belief that too much wealth is fundamentally immoral and unhealthy for society.
There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.
You can not divorce religious belief and public service. I've never detected any conflict between God's will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.
On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. We relax so totally that people believe the most ludicrous propositions, and are willing to organize their lives around them.
People are willing to do the most appalling things to another person for the sake of imposing a religious belief.
I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.
It's important to ask candidates about their beliefs, in part because politicians frequently exploit religious faith - often with the idea that voters will be more likely to unthinkingly accept certain political positions so long as they arise from religious belief.
Religious belief, like history itself, is a story that is always unfolding, always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is no faith.
My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.