I'll wager I'd rather have Ron in my pew than you.

How dare you appropriate faith as something only you understand, and worse yet—set yourself up as the arbiter of God’s law. As a religious person with years of theological and philosophical study and deep involvement with the Church and a specific religious order (the Jesuits) is it so inconceivable to you that people of good faith may reasonably disagree on positions? Must they be ‘godless’ if they depart from your understanding?

More to the point—Christ himself reserved his harshest condemnation not for sinners (whom he readily forgave) but for the Sadducees, Pharisees and Herodians who used religious law like a club and dared to wield faith as a weapon with which to bludgeon others and condemn them rather than to reach out to them. The consequences of such were made very clear to them.

The very word ‘religion’ means to unite.

Indeed—many of the issues that you would associate with ‘the left’; care for the poorest among us, stewardship of the earth, compassion and forgiveness of those who would harm you, mercy and care for those imprisoned are precisely the sorts of faith the gospels call for.

It should sadden anyone with even a modicum of scriptural understanding to see a living faith reduced to a creed or set of rules used to circumscribe behavior and condemn the actions of others. Such behavior carries its own punishment as alienation from the higher message those scriptures represent.