A few lines a day, perhaps, are reasonable over the next few weeks. My main point is made. If you wish to discuss the reasoning on this blog, email me at <drwendell49@gmail.com> . I'd love to hear from you, and I promise that I will reply within a day or two at most. 

But to business. 

I think this is a good point at which to ramble through parts of some of the world's major religions in order to explain why I don't belong to any them. Unitarianism, in spite of what many people see as its vagueness, or wishy-washiness, is as much of a traditional religion as I am willing to embrace. But it makes good sense to me. 

It is the dialogue about spiritual matters that is most precious, not any one dogma. The freedom for each individual human being to find his or her own path to the deity or universal consciousness, and to live a life informed by courage, wisdom, freedom, and love in a personally designed balance, is sacred. At minimum, that personal balance should allow other people to go their own way, as long as they are letting you go yours. The old saying in English is: "Live and let live." Thus, the changes we want to bring about in our society we should try to accomplish by rational persuasion, no matter how long or difficult that path may seem. 

But what of the world's major religions? If I'm right about the connection between moral values and human social behavior and thence to human survival, then can I deal with some real cases? Can I offer evidence and argument to show that the tenets of some of the world's major religions threaten our species' survival over the long haul? 

Consider Christianity. It's single biggest flaw is the exact one that the Muslims insist they could never compromise with. In fact, it is the main point of the Koran. Jesus is not divine. God has no partners. The whole idea of any splitting of the sacred is dangerous for human society over the long haul. Why? Because when people divide up their idea of universal consciousness, that is, the sacred, they are well on the way down the road to dividing up their moral code. In any form of polytheism, there will always be the opportunity for the spoiled kids in the family to try to play Mom against Dad or Dad against Mom or Grandpa against both of them. 

What I mean is that Christians very easily, naturally, and humanly slip into equivocating their way to treating non-Christians as lesser beings. This comes from believing that people who don't think Jesus was a god aren't quite as good or as morally considerable as those who do. Under this thinking, if I, as a Christian, treat you cruelly, well, you aren't a Christian. It doesn't matter as much as if I did the same thing to one of my Christian neighbors. That thinking, if it were deeply entrenched in the head of some powerful leader in the West, could pull our species into a nuclear war, the catastrophe we must avoid at all cost. That kind of thinking is indeed dangerous.  

Jesus never claimed to be divine. He claimed to represent the best version of divine wisdom that was circulating in the world at his time. He said that if people wanted to be saved, they had to follow him in the sense of emulating his compassionate and non-materialistic way of life. 

The leaders of the early Christian church invented the "man-god" concept. They did so, consciously or unconsciously, because the net result was that they could then insist that Jesus, the divine one, had passed the mission to establish his church to his favorite disciple, who had set up the church of Rome, and passed on this sacred mission to its leaders. The church's edicts from then on were therefore, supposedly, above any humanly-made laws or arguments. 

This thinking, by so many Christians in all later sects, that they have a lawyer with contacts in the eternal court who can get his clients a deal, is prevalent right into our time. There are some in virtually every denomination of Christianity who will assert flatly that one cannot get into the blessed afterlife unless one has accepted the divinity of Jesus. A man.  

This specialness that only comes with being saved, and that makes Christians unique, was used to justify all sorts of crimes all through history, including, glaringly, the pogroms conducted against the Jews and the Crusades. "We're better than they are. They won't convert even when given every reasonable chance. They deserve whatever happens after that." 

Of course, other religions have used similar arguments to justify their similar crimes. But it's Christians I am talking about in this essay. They are no better and too often, they are smugly confident that they really are. We all have to get over this "us-them" nonsense. 

The polytheists in every form - including Christians because that's what they are - have over and over found moral rationalization a little too easy. Athena can get you a deal with Zeus. Freya has pull with Odin. You have a coterie of judges on an archipelago of moral codes, and you can navigate among them. And Jesus can get you a deal with the Father.  

Of course, I admit that Christians are often very likable people. I have several Christian friends. I don't make this case to them unless they ask why I can't be a Christian. But if they do ask, I also don't hold back out of concern for their feelings or for courtesy's sake. This matter is too important to equivocate over. But once the point is made, I can let it go. Meme complexes - what we usually call "ideas" - can survive on their own. They just need to be put into the meme sea and set free. 

And yes, I really believe that. Almost all humans, given the chance to weigh matters carefully and privately, can think quite soundly for themselves. It just takes time. On the small, medium, or global scale, hope for humans only runs out when we stop trying to talk to each other. 

If you, dear reader, feel that this logic can be disputed, please, write to me at the email address above. I will post all rhetorically sound replies. 

And in any case, have a nice day.