re: #755 Walter L. Newton

I am saying the the content does not have as much to do as the intent does.

Why, though? Obivously, content is the most important part of the speech, and what Beck is criticized for, and what MLK is celebrated for, is the content of their message, not the format of them.

Beck’s language yesterday, his rhetoric, was very much in the mold of the sort of preaching you hear/have heard from many preachers through history, including MLK.

Language and rhetoric are actually very different things, and you’re very wrongly conflating them. He used religious language, yes. So does Pat Robertson. So does the Dali Llama. If your point is only “Religious language is religoius language”, um, yeah.

My simple point was I don’t think you can define “Religious Right” by the words that come out of their mouth, so much as how they use those words, and their intent behind them.

I agree. That’s why content matters. I’m not sure how you think you can determine intent, of course.

That’s all my point was.

I think that you wrongly think that people are calling liturgical language Beckian, or that people have the impression that only those on the Religious right use religious language. I’m not sure where you got the idea from, but it’s rather patently untrue.