First, Happy St. Patrick's Day. Tomorrow is JP Day. This is the day for Irish/Italian mutts, given Monday is St. Joseph's Day, a patron saint of Italians. I am named after my paternal Irish grandfather ... though my mom (the corn beef and cabbage aside) made it clear she is an "American." Her Irish maiden name notwithstanding. As to religion, a reply to my book review below is on point -- it is how you practice it. Hilzoy discussed the matter in an interesting fashion. A taste:
What is a problem is to have someone in office who claims to care only about what God thinks and how God will judge him, but who doesn't actually take this idea seriously. Someone like that will use the thought that only God's opinion matters simply to dismiss human criticism, without actually worrying about God. He will regard God as a convenient excuse, someone he can assume agrees with him. But to believe in a God who is, in fact, you, or who is so unreal to you that you don't need to bother taking His views seriously, is not faith; it is the opposite of faith.
There is also the issue of guns. Salon had a piece by a hunter responding to the nature/hunter friendly writer that ... up to a point (his wuss retraction has gotten less play) ... got in trouble saying assault weapons don't belong in hunting. I am no fan of the "sport," more in the school addressed by the person referenced here, but the governor of Montana is just one person that underlines that it can very well go hand in hand with environmentalism. Steven Rinella notes that "well regulated" fits in well here, extremists on the other side notwithstanding:
My point is that it's not firearms, or certain types of firearms, that might threaten hunting today; it's the regulations that govern the use of all weapons on our remaining wild lands, whether that weapon is a bow-and-arrow in the hands of a Vermont poacher killing black bears for the illegal market in gall bladder, or a bulldozer in the hands of a Montana developer selling inter-mountain trophy estates with names like Elk Meadows, or a roll of 10-foot fence in the hands of yet another Texan who's looking to enclose a herd of imported exotic species on his own private hunting reserve.
Wildlife management is one of those important things where there is an opening for some across ideological lines unity. Like religion, more than some might think.