Letters - Going Dutch - NYTimes.com

Letters - Going Dutch - NYTimes.com:

I didn't post about the original article, it's in my stack of reading material, but i liked the letters, especially the first one here:

"To me as a religious-studies professor and Lutheran minister, the most telling line in Russell Shorto’s article (May 3) was, “This system developed not after Karl Marx, but after Martin Luther and Francis of Assisi.” The last time I taught in the Semester at Sea program, I found it necessary to interpret for our students the rich “social capital” that runs through the Northern European societies we were visiting. What they knew and had read in their guide books was that not many people are in church on Sunday morning, especially compared to the florid religiosity of the United States. So their working assumption was that Americans take religion seriously and Europeans don’t. The new thought that amazed them was that the unchurched Europeans live in social democracies deeply saturated with historic Christian values, while the much-churched Americans celebrate a society characterized by a ruthless social Darwinism that the God of the Bible, Old and New Testament alike, denounces.
DONALD HEINZ
Gig Harbor, Wash."

As to the rest of the letters, particularly the critical ones, I simply say, "OMG, you mean there are trade-offs required? We can't have everything for nothing? Then count me out!"

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