Religion Is Not A Nice Thing. It

The Early Doctrines Of The Church, Even Doctrines Like Trinity And Incarnation Were Originally Also Calls For Action, Calls For Selflessness, Calls For Compassion, And Unless You Live That Out Compassionately, Selflessly, You Didn't Understand What The Doctrine Was Saying.

Storytelling Is Fine As Long As You Can Encourage People To Act On The Stories.

It Is People Who Are Violent, Rather Than "religions"; And Since We Secularised Our Politics We Have Had Two Major World Wars, The Holocaust, The Soviet Gulag, And The Atomic Attacks On Hiroshima And Nagasaki - None Of Which Were Inspired By Religion. If We Want To Understand The Dangers Of Our World, We Can No Longer Accept The Old Received Ideas.

We Have To Make A Disciplined Effort To Find Out What Our Governments Are Doing In These Various Parts Of The World And What Is Actually Happening. We Have To Learn To Listen To Each Other's Stories. Something We Are Not Very Good At.

Every Single One Of The Major World Faiths, Whether We're Talking About Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Darwinism, Judaism, Christianity And Islam, Have All Come To The Conclusion That What Holds Us Back From Our Better Self Is Ego, Selfishness, Greed, Unkindness, Hatred. And It All Springs From A Sense Of Thwarted Ego.