And I think, too, about what an awful doctrine it is that I was born fucked up–that the consequences of decisions made by someone thousands of years ago must be carried by me, that I was “born in sin”, which is to say that I was born convicted of a crime, born guilty of a crime–and that ONLY by full and voluntary submission to the ideas of those leading one church or another, through de facto submission to men, in the name of God, can I somehow be “washed clean”. And for more than a thousand years, that submission was quite directly to men who profited from it. Yes, my baptism at birth would have saved my soul, but it only stayed saved through the surrender of personal autonomy of conscience and behavior.
Countless thousands perished in the literal fires built by men who claimed to serve God. The Romans found Christians distasteful only because they rejected everything they believed, quite publicly. They were otherwise completely tolerant to all beliefs and practices. The Jews were less tolerant, but there is no record of anything like inquisitions and the mass killing of alleged heretics.
One does not find radical intolerance UNTIL Christianity, the creed allegedly based on love, but whose unique power rested on fear.
It is certainly possible to say that “the truth is the truth”, but on the face of it does this sound like a merciful God? I cannot remotely accept their scientism, atheism, and belief in matter, but I understand quite well the theological objections of the Dawkins and Harris’s of the world.