I sometimes hear critics say I am against the creeds. This is not exactly true. I am against using the creeds to replace love as the essence of the Christian faith. I am against using the dogmas of sectarian Christianity to replace the call to universal love. And, I am against using belief to replace functioning minds.If truth is important to us, then it is necessary to be radically honest. A part of honesty is not claiming as personal knowledge reports that have been told to us second or third hand. To gather weekly to entrance ourselves by repeating the same words in a creed is not a reliable path to honesty, much less love. In the American Revolution both sides had a majority of self proclaimed Christians. A majority of people on both sides affirmed the essential tenets of the Christian faith and yet neither side found in their faith a reason not to kill the other. That fact alone should warn us that creeds do not lead to peace even between people of the same faith.People sometimes claim that belief in the resurrection of Jesus is the heart of the Christian faith, but Christianity based on the resurrection is faith in power, not in love. If Hitler had died and resurrected it would not prove the validity of hate. According to scripture there were many witnesses to the resurrection, but those witnesses were recorded by the same authors who wrote of the resurrection in the first place. To use the people in the resurrection stories as witnesses to the resurrection is like using Achilles’ men to prove the existence of the Trojan horse, or the characters in nursery rhymes to prove the existence of Mother Goose. Stories of magical power may satisfy incurious minds, but they do not reliably lead to honest minds nor loving hearts. There is nothing wrong with creeds as a kind of spiritual poetry, but if we tell stories of miracles we must never forget one thing:It is love that validates power, not power that validates love.