Time for a Bake Sale

[meridannight]

"PS. don't send them to Europe. we don't want them. and they won't survive in this environment for long. "

Interesting comment Meridannight. I think you are right. Could you give us a rundown of the characteristics of the environment of which you speak? Seems to me that we in the US particularly forget that Europe is indeed a different set of attitudes.

i don't know, people here don't care about religion so much. it's more practice-at-the-privacy-of-your-own-home rather than bringing it out and/or advocating it in public, or acting as if everything else stemmed from religion.

religion is an isolated and a private phenomenon in Europe. a keep-it-to-yourself. in the States it appears to be more integrated to one's actions, and daily life and it appears to be a public matter.

you also don't see Mormon establishments in Europe. the pope is still in Rome, but the Vatican influence comes more from real estate holdings and business than religious dogma. and everybody knows this. you can't bullshit your way out of it. people have seen through religion for what it is and it's not taken seriously.

extreme religiosity is viewed with suspicion and repulsion by most, whether you're a Muslim extremist or a Christian one. even the people who do claim to be religious, they don't really act religious. they don't go by the book. it's more like those people have their own individual interpretation of their religion, and it's private and not emphasized. and it doesn't match the ''official'' mainstream religious interpretation, and it doesn't even match with other religious people's interpretations, and it's not even fixed in time. it keeps changing and reinterpreted, and there's really no core religious feel to it at all. there are as many interpretations as there are people. and nobody thinks of mixing religion with politics. that's nonsensical.

[Hardheaded1]

I DO hope they can get a good deal on a bit of real estate. I would rather think that there is a fairly cheap plot down in Jonestown, Guyana.

If they tried, they could probably make a killing down there.

[ShiftyNJ]

I felt like religious influence (or at least its fruits, in the way families acted) was still pretty strong in both rural Italy and Malta when I was there, but I may be misinterpreting the divide between what is religion and what is culture.