Religion Is Hard Work. Its Insights Are

We Have Domesticated God's Transcendence. We Often Learn About God At About The Same Time As We Are Learning About Santa Claus; But Our Ideas About Santa Claus Change, Mature And Become More Nuanced, Whereas Our Ideas Of God Can Remain At A Rather Infantile Level.

People Knew There Were Two Ways Of Coming At Truth. One Was Science, Or What The Greeks Called Logos, Reason, Logic. And That Was Essential That The Discourse Of Science Or Logic Related Directed To The External World. The Other Was Mythos, What The Greeks Called Myth, Which Didn't Mean A Fantasy Story, But It Was A Narrative Associated With Ritual And Ethical Practice But It Helped Us To Address Problems For Which There Were No Easy Answers, Like Mortality, Cruelty, The Sorrow That Overtakes Us All That's Part Of The Human Condition. And These Two Were Not In Opposition, We Needed Both.

Religion Is Not A Nice Thing. It Is Potentially A Very Dangerous Thing Because It Involves A Heady Complex Of Emotions, Desires, Yearnings And Fears.

If Your Understanding Of The Divine Made You Kinder, More Empathetic, And Impelled You To Express Sympathy In Concrete Acts Of Loving-kindness, This Was Good Theology. But If Your Notion Of God Made You Unkind, Belligerent, Cruel, Of Self-righteous, Or If It Led You To Kill In God's Name, It Was Bad Theology.

Golden Rule Lies At The Heart Of Every Religious And Of Every Ethical System Of Morality, It What Makes Us Look At One Another. The Religions Have All Adopted It Independently, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Because They Find It Works And Because It Says Something Very Deep About The Structure Of Our Humanity.