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So many people live with anger and unforgiveness, and many of them are Christians.

People use the notion of God to bully people and hurt people, when we can use the concept to respect and uplift.

Sometimes people's spiritual ideas become fixed and they use them against those who don't share their beliefs - in effect, becoming fundamentalist. It's very dangerous - the finger of righteous indignation pointing at someone who is identified as bad or wrong.

Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.

The central ideas of Christianity, an angry God and vicarious atonement, are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present stage of enlightenment, absurd, preposterous, and blasphemous propositions.

As we look around, it's very clear that in this world people do outrageous things to one another all of the time. It's not that these qualities or actions make us bad people, but they bring tremendous suffering if we don't know how to work with them.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.

As Christians, we worship a victimized Lord. We should expect to suffer and should have particular compassion on those who hurt emotionally and physically. But we do not resemble the Suffering Servant when we take pains to show off our suffering.

We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another. The idea of true evil has been blown away.