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From time to time I am informed on Facebook that I am a bad Christian. That is just fine with me. I believe Jesus wasn’t trying to make us good Christians but good human beings.

The Christianity I fell in love with as a child was not that of Augustine, Luther or Calvin, but the message of universal love I found in Albert Schweitzer and Leo Tolstoy. A religion of love can embrace other religions, science, and even join common cause with Atheists who want to protect humanity from religious intolerance and superstition.

Jesus said, if you are offering your gift at the alter and remember you have wronged someone, leave your gift at the altar and go restore the relationship. (Mt. 5:23-2) To me, that verse implies Jesus was more concerned about reconciliation and social justice than religion and personal righteousness.

If we start with the actual teachings of Jesus, it would be very hard for us to end up as religious fundamentalists. Jesus taught in parables, not dogmas. Parables are a call to deeper understanding, not to unblinking belief. If we are called bad Christians because we question honestly, then so be it. It is the truth that sets us free, not Christian dogma.

Jesus taught a forgiveness that leads to reconciliation not a moralism that leads to ostracism. Jesus said if we forgive others we will be forgiven, period. There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus that calls us to social inquisitions or crusades. Jesus even seemed to prefer the company of his society’s scapegoats over the “righteous” ones doing the finger pointing.

To be healthy, religion must have a strong element of deconstruction about it. An early Christian mystic was asked why he didn’t carry a bible with him. The old Monk responded that the Bible teaches us to sell everything we have and give the money to the poor, so he sold his Bible and gave the money to the poor.

For Jesus, religion seems to have been a vessel to learn and teach love. Religion can be a communal husk to grow the seeds of love, but we must never forget the difference between the husk and the seed. If being good human beings makes us bad Christians, then so be it. When forced to choose between the kind of love Jesus taught and the Christian religion, we should choose love every time.

I want to express heartfelt thanks to the handful of Republicans who have strongly condemned the lies of the MAGA movement against Haitians.

I realize Republicans who commit the crime of human decency pay a price in the MAGA juggernaut which has kidnapped their party. I am sincerely grateful to those who refuse to sacrifice their principles for power.

I am also grateful to the minority of Christian conservatives who have found the courage to renounce the heresy of Christian nationalism. The Bible condemns bearing false witness against one’s neighbor, but, unfortunately, MAGA Christians are just fine with bearing false witness so long as it is done in the name of Donald Trump and now, JD Vance. Forget the First Commandment, MAGA Christians put America first.

Republicans are not hateful by nature. Individually most Republicans are exemplary citizens and human beings but, so long as Trump is their candidate, traditional Republicans are having to blend in with rapacious billionaires, Confederate wannabes, racists, patriarchs and the daily lies of Donald Trump himself. Honest fact checking has become a heresy in the MAGA movement.

Of course, there was no proof for the claim that Haitians were eating peoples pets. And even JD Vance implied he doesn’t care whether his words are true, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” So Vance’s hope seems to be that he can lie his way to the truth.

Haitians should not have to pay the price for the plutocratic policies that have cannibalized American workers. The sad state of the American middle class must be pinned on Wall Street not on Port-au-Prince.

Haiti is actually one of the bravest little islands in the world. They were a capitalist haven in the 1700’s until enslaved workers rose up and threw off their French exploiters.

In 1804, little Haiti became the only Black republic in the world by expelling its French colonizers. But, just as in Vietnam, the United States was only too willing to help the French restore a misbehaving colony to its “rightful” owner. As much as the various imperial nations might hate each other, their ultimate nightmare was that the rest of the world’s people might actually get free and share this world fairly.

Liberty is a wonderful slogan, but nations with colonies always restrict freedom to their own citizens. The rest of the world looks like one big sweatshop to the imperialist mind.

As in so many other nations seeking self determination, the U.S. sent in troops to occupy Haiti and propped up dictators friendly to U.S. interests. Like Napoleon before them, the U.S. did everything it could to crush the spirit of these Black revolutionaries but they could not bring proud Haitians to their knees. I don’t believe they ever will. To this day white supremacists and colonizers have not been able to extinguish the fierce Haitian desire for liberty. Haitians have been linked with diseases, black magic (think about that term) and now with devouring our pets. Every decent person in the world must rise to protect Haitians from MAGA lies.

The MAGA movement would not have to be so dishonest if their obsolete beliefs actually worked in the real world. They would not have to be so vicious if their dreams did not exclude so many real members of our one human family. MAGA Republicans would not have to beat their breast at every turn were they not so empty and so terrified of the fact that the rest of the world is throwing off ancient chains and rising up to claim their full birthright as human beings.

I was one of those kids who captured insects and took them outside rather than kill them. My dad had no idea when we went fishing that I wasn’t really putting a worm on my hook.

For some reason, when I was back in school, I found dissecting frogs in biology class to be particularly offensive. I felt I could look at charts of the inside of a frog there was no reason an animal had to be killed for me to learn what I needed for a 101 biology class.

It seemed to me, when we dissect a frog down to its parts, the one thing we don’t get to know is the frog. When I got to be a certain age I simply refused to participate in dissecting animals. Fortunately for me my teachers were kind enough to let me off the hook. They could have flunked me but they gave me alternative assignments.

This deep impulse to protect life made sense when I read Albert Schweitzer’s essays. He was trying to find a new foundation for ethics. He called his foundation “reverence for life.” I felt my own heart had been mapped out for me to see.

One would think someone so finicky about killing would not have grown up to be pro-choice, but meeting survivors of rape and assault help me realized that life is not so simple. Life feeds on life, which is why my early attempts at complete nonviolence were doomed to failure. There is no pristine sideline to be found in nature where one can remain harmless and innocent. In the real world life struggles with life. In the real world if we force the lion to lay down with the lamb one of them is in serious trouble.

Those who claim to be protecting the innocent unborn by passing anti-abortion laws are not necessarily being non-violent. Such laws can mean coercion for the person who is pregnant. Sometimes those coercive laws can cause injury to those who are pregnant. “Right to Life” laws can even lead to increased maternal mortality rates.

I still believe Schweitzer was right in his assumption that life is the gold standard of value for ethics, and so doing as little harm as possible to others is important. And, Gandhi is still the architect of my activism. But, I believe both of my life heroes (both men) were a bit naive and simplistic. “Life” is not found discretely packaged in individual forms. “Life” is one ecological whole that sometimes demands hard decisions.

Pregnancy has risks that I as a male did not understand. I now realize laws that risk the lives of fully developed human beings to protect the un-gestated is not really non-violent at all. For men to impose their simplistic views upon women in complicated and dangerous situations is its own form of violence.

To truly resist fascism it is not enough to hate the fascism of other countries or of demagogic leaders here at home. Before we can be truly anti-fascist we must first purge our own fascistic tendencies.

To truly resist fascism:

We must learn to love compassion more than we love power.

We must learn to love the web of life more than we love our own private property.

We must learn to love human solidarity more than we love any one nation or interest group.

We must desire the uplift of our human family over our own personal success.

And we must learn to love the the truth of our common experience over our most beloved creed be it religious, political or economic..

Only if we purge the lust for power from our own hearts are we capable of resisting the fascism of someone else without replacing it with our own.

To say “religion is good” or “religion is bad” are equally meaningless statements until we agree on what we each mean by the word “religion.”

To define the word “religion” only in terms of the good it has done, or only in terms of the evil, are equally dishonest approaches. If we treat religion as a topic area like philosophy or politics then we can have a more helpful conversation about what kinds of religion are helpful and what kinds are hurtful.

To some people the word “religion” refers primarily to the worst and most fundamentalist forms of the three Abrahamic faiths. As such, religion is defined as patriarchal, dogmatic and domineering. That is an understandable position, but it reflects an ignorance of those outside our own culture, and those within our culture who have transcended the popular definitions. If we consider all the religions of the world there are also non-patriarchal, non-hierarchal and non-domineering religions.

Do not some people use the word “religion” to refer to the rituals of life, such as when friends gather at a grave to ritualize their love for a parted friend? Are there not people who use the word “religion” to speak of their gratitude and wonderment before the mysteries of life and the cosmos?

If we consider all the people of earth who consider themselves religious, there are religions of domination AND religions of liberation. There are patriarchal religions AND religions that celebrate the entire spectrum of gender. There are religions that dwell on the supernatural AND religions that find the sacred in nature.

We must be very humble when we use the word “religion” lest we arrogantly and ignorantly speak of all the people of the world as if they were all one homogenous blob. What a shame it would be to throw away Rumi, Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King just because they have been filed under the same category as televangelists and inquisitors

To have a meaningful conversation about religion we have to LISTEN to other people and find out what they personally mean when they use that word. To assume everyone who identifies as religious should be using YOUR definition is a strange kind of open mindedness.

It is understandable that many in our day use the word “religion” as a synonym for patriarchy, superstition and moralizing. Many religions have been guilty of all that evil and more. Some people consider themselves “spiritual, not religious,” but can any of us be purely spiritual beings? Against our best intentions, we who would be purely spiritual fall into some of the age old traps of religion. My question is, “Can religion ever be a gift to humankind?”

If religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must be universal. That is, religion must consider the good of all. It must purge itself of nationalism and merely sectarian loyalties. It must see itself as a servant of all, not as some heavenly appointed bouncer.

If religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must align itself to nature not just to some invisible being it is calling “God.” Religion must learn to love real people in the real world and to find the sacred in the ordinary. Religion must learn to be kind to animals as well as people. It must limit its wants to those that are sustainable ecologically.

If religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must completely purge its language of sexism. When religion uses exclusively masculine language for what it considers holy, it is actually worshipping patriarchy. Such patriarchal religion becomes an accomplice to every act of violence against women and LGBTQIA+ members of our human family.

If religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must not use its own creeds to replace reason and science. Religion must cease speaking its own special jargon and learn to communicate humbly with its neighbors.

If religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must stop making its own moral code a substitute for universal human rights. Religion must not shame people for having bodies and for having physical needs. It must stop teaching ethics as obedience to its own authority and begin to call people to their own prophetic responsibility.

In other words, if religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must see itself as a means, not an end; an example, not an exception and a servant, not a master.

There was once a preacher who owned a parrot he named “Pierre.”

The old man loved Pierre so much that he taught the bird to recite the Apostle’s Creed so the bird could go to heaven with him when it died.

Eventually, the bird died. The preacher followed him in death a few years later. Arriving in heaven, the preacher did not see Pierre anywhere. The preacher was terribly disappointed to see Jesus and Buddha playing badminton. The preacher’s worst enemy, a man he knew to be a hardcore Atheist, was keeping score.

Seeing the preacher’s disillusionment, Jesus and Buddha smiled at each other for a moment. Then Jesus said, “All of this is happening in your mind. Eternity doesn’t have a shape. Heaven is actually our experience of the essential unity of all being.”

Buddha nodded, “You could have been here all along.”

Jesus continued, “I’m afraid to say you’ve always misunderstood what I was trying to teach you. I did not want ANYONE to sing the parrot’s song of conventional religion. I wanted everyone to sing the song of their own heart, and to sing it in harmony with everyone else’s heart song.”

The preacher lamented, “But I spent all that time teaching my parrot to recite the Apostle’s Creed so he could be with me forever.”

Jesus replied, “Pierre is here, but he could never be in heaven as a captive within your cage. And you could never be with him in heaven so long as you think of him as your possession. Pierre is flying free just above you. He didn’t go to YOUR heaven, he went to HIS.”

Many MAGA Republicans are insistent about placing the 10 Commandments in public schools. Apparently MAGA Republicans are not so concerned the commandments actually be obeyed, especially by Donald Trump himself.

In Tuesday’s debate, seen by 67 million people, Donald Trump made the claim that Haitians in Ohio are eating peoples’ pets. He said, “In Springfield (Ohio), they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

When one of the moderators pointed out that the Springfield police stated they had received no such reports, Trump responded he had seen some people on television saying it.

The Associated Press tried to figure out how the original rumor got started:

“On Sept. 6, a post surfaced on X that shared what looked like a screen grab of a social media post apparently out of Springfield. The retweeted post talked about the person’s “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” seeing a cat hanging from a tree to be butchered and eaten, claiming without evidence that Haitians lived at the house. The accompanying photo showed a Black man carrying what appeared to be a Canada goose by its feet. That post continued to get shared on social media.”

That’s right, the “proof” for this rumor comes from a “neighbor’s daughter’s friend.” It seems to me such a low standard of verification should disqualify an applicate for the lowest law enforcement office in the land, much less the highest.

And, since the MAGA movement considers the 10 Commandments so foundational, let’s think about what their presidential candidate’s false witness might mean to some of the people he is putting in harm’s way.

The Haitian Times interviewed Haitian Americans in the aftermath of Trump’s claims that Haitians are eating the pets of people in Springfield:

“We’re all victims this morning,” said (one) woman, who moved to Springfield six years ago. “They’re attacking us in every way.”

Aside from the anxiety caused by Tuesday night’s debate, the woman also said her cars have been vandalized twice in the middle of the night. She woke up one morning to broken windows and another to acid thrown on the vehicle. She’s added cameras to her driveway and tried to report the incidents to the police to no avail.

“I’m going to have to move because this area is no longer good for me,” she said. “I can’t even leave my house to go to Walmart. I’m anxious and scared.”

Trump supporters have sent out a flood of cat memes to fan the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment. In many ways memes are the perfect replacement for reason and science in propagandized minds. Memes are powerful images that require little or no actual thought. They just feel true.

When Donald Trump said any journalist criticizing him was guilty of printing “fake news” he brought America to a crisis point. Democracy cannot stand if people refuse to test their truth claims by some objective measure. The commitment not to bear false witness is a commitment to test our assumptions, not by whether they make us feel comfortable, but whether they stand in the harsh light of other vantage points.

Being honest witnesses means not presenting as personal knowledge that which we only know secondhand. Being honest witnesses does not mean always defending our beliefs from criticism. It means ruthlessly testing such reports before we share them as facts.

Being good witnesses means remembering that all human knowledge is perspectival. In Gandhi’s imagery, each of us looks through one facet of a great diamond. We must be ruthlessly honest about what we know AND what we do NOT know. Only by each of us honestly playing out our role as faithful witnesses can we together find glimmers of that truth obtainable to we quivering primates who call ourselves “humankind.”

As a minister It is always a bit strange to receive veiled threats of damnation because I am not orthodox enough.

I don’t know a lot of things about the afterlife, but I do know with every cell of my being that, if heaven is really a gated community, I would be compelled by the teachings of Jesus to refuse heaven and minister to the suffering souls in hell.

How could I digest, much less enjoy, a heavenly banquet while tortured members of my human family were screaming in pain just beneath my feet down in hell?

And why would Jesus have taught the path of love if the wisest course were a cowardly indifference to the damned just to save our own skin?

People sometimes mistakenly believe that I have entered the ministry to shake their faith and to destroy religion. I say “mistakenly” because I believe that true faith is what emerges only after we have been radically honest about our lives.

Religion can be a helpful scaffold for nurturing the human spirit, but it can even more easily become a prison for hearts and minds. No one can honestly deny the atrocities and failures of religion. Most traditional religion does not answer the great questions of life. Still, I believe the answer to bad religion does not lay in spending our lives laughing at the people groping for light. I believe we need to re-connect with the deep human aspirations that originally gave birth to religion. Then we need to free those aspirations from the fossilized forms of religion that remain.

To believe in a religious symbol or to disbelieve in a religious symbol are both ways to miss the point. Living symbols are not superficial beliefs but beacons reminding us there is something more profound than our deepest values, something more expansive than our widest truths and something more creative than our highest purpose.

To me, “faith” is a trust in the life process, not in religion. But it is hard to sustain that trust without symbols that remind us of wider truths, rituals that awaken us to deeper qualities and practices that remind us of our shared life.

Healthy religion ALWAYS calls us beyond itself and into the shared living some call “love.” We do not need to call it “religion.” We do not even need to use the symbol “God.” Call it what you will, but do not let yourself go numb to your own aspiration to give yourself to moments of wonderment, to the aspiration to live your life as an art, and to give yourself away in compassionate service to our one common life.

Authentic faith can only emerge after our comfortable truths have died. I am not attacking religion to destroy it, but to seek out its deeper roots. The phoenix of love cannot be born if it has not passed through a terrible flame.