Oops! Make that Tarak Nath Das.

Also 'A Letter to a Hindu', written by Tolstoy to Tarak Das Nath, an Indian revolutionary, in which he expounds on the liberating potential of love as espoused by all the great religions.

I offer this not as a counterpoint, but as another interesting addition to the discussion – that Ghandi's movement based on non-violent dissent was chiefly inspired by Leo Tolstoy's book "The Kingdom of God is within you". The two great men exchanged many letters though i doubt they ever met. "The Kingdom of God is within you" was banned by the catholic church, which is only one of the many reasons i would highly reccomend it to both Christian and non-Christians alike.

Is Christianity really more amenable to the cause of reform than other religions? The evidence presented is that Christian Europe produced the ideas than underpin modernity (democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, etc).

But as I have pointed out before, these concepts have their origins in the pre-Christian era. It can be argued that Christianity actually helped snuff out the tradition of intellectual inquiry that once flourished in ancient Greece and Rome. And that it was revived only when religious influence began to wane in the aftermath of the schisms.

At any rate, the Enlightenment was more a European phenomenon than a Christian one. Ethiopia, despite being one of the oldest Christian nations in the world, has turned out nothing like Europe.

Although the record might largely suggest otherwise, Christianity can no doubt empower reform without violence, But Gandhi has shown us that the Indic religions have at least the same potential.

Your fourth paragraph is, as you admit, a digression. In fact, it's an attempt to smuggle in a spot of proselitysing here! I mean really Frog… But thanks for pointing out my ill-considered gender reference. Won't make that mistake again.

rajivmv,
As i said, mine was just one way of interpreting the course of history in the hope that there may be lessens to be learnt. The richer and more diverse our interpretations are, the better and thus i am richer for having read your interpretation. I offer my views, not as facts, but as an attempt to describe the sensations of my fingertips as i blindly reach out to feel out and touch the unknowns of the past – but that's the best anyone can do. History is a wise old man who is deaf and dumb – it possesses boundless knowledge but feeble in its dispense. That is why we still have to struggle and reform ourselves as a nation and society despite maturing through 2000 years.

When the military spokesman was asked as to why the LTTE should fire such shells, he pulled another "rabbit from his magic hat" and said that the LTTE wanted a truce !!

The war in SL is turning out to be a story of the magicians amusing people with "hats" and "rabbits"!!

Talk against any truce whatsoever is headed by the "clenched fist" lot in the state ledership and the miltary, both of whom are blood thirsty for Tamil genocide. The fingers of their "clenched fists" need to be straigtened by the UN to make a truce come into force, send UN monitors and investigate genocide.

Telling the untruth and propping up blatant lies, like a magician pulling out a "rabbit from his hat", about Tamils and on Tamil matters, is in the rotten leadership of the state, its bloody military and the DNA of its major Sinhalese lot; a reason why journalists and the UN monitors are disall;owed in the war zone. If allowed the "rabbits from hats" would cease coming out!!

And yet, Buddhist teachings provide just as much material to challenge tyranny as Christian concepts do. The Dhamma, for example, is supreme to all political and religious powers. This idea of an Almighty God exists in Islam too, but the Islamic world has not followed the example of Europe.

I don't think you can attribute the European Enlightenment primarily to Christianity, nor our current relative backwardness to Buddhism. Theology can be invoked in service of any argument. Martin Luther picked his cherries from the same tree as Torquemada.

And you sir present the plea to the Triple Gem as the sum total of Buddhist philosophy. Proof that it brooks no dissent or independent thought. Yet, in a previous incarnation, you pointed out that the Buddha invited his followers to question his philosophy.

The Enlightenment sprang out of a complex confluence of factors in European culture, much of which can be traced back to pre-Christian Greece and Rome. I see no reason to believe, as you infer, that Buddhism condemns its adherents and their societies to permanent intellectual and spiritual poverty. Even less that mass conversion to Christianity is the answer.

More substantively, Citizen's point — as I read it — was not that Buddhist philosophy does not have within it wonderful resources for forming and shaping a better society — I would agree with you that it does — but that that it might be less amenable (than Christianity) to being used by the lay people to challenge the hierarchies of religious order and State.

The assumption, I suppose, is that an important ingredient of "reforming" and "improving" is the ability to challenge status-quo and institutions of power with something other than violence. Societies in which people don't find the resources to do that might tend to become worse over time.

I can see the point you make — by citing Islam — that it is not necessarily the belief in an all powerful God that creates that empowering possibility. So I wonder what it is that creates such empowerment, if Citizen is right.

Is it that the Christian God in Jesus takes the side of the weak and the victim, becoming himself the object of harassment by Church and State? So, not just an all powerful God, but one who chooses in a very special way to identify and be identified with the down-trodden? One who might right now, be more easily identified with the trapped civilians in the Vanni, than with the causes of the Army or the LTTE? I don't know.

But I digress. The point I wanted to make is that it is not about the theoretical theological/philosophical resources but about the sociological consequences of that theology/philosophy which Citizen seems to be speaking — at least to my reading.