There Must Be No Coercion

We Want To Create, Never Mind The Leaders Or The Bishops Or Chief Rabbis Or Imams, Or Popes. We Want To Create A Grassroots Movement Where People Will Become Attuned To Uncompassionate Discourse In The Same Way As We Are Now Attuned To Sort Of Gender Imbalance In Our Speech.

A God Who Kept Tinkering With The Universe Was Absurd; A God Who Interfered With Human Freedom And Creativity Was A Tyrant. If God Is Seen As A Self In A World Of His Own, An Ego That Relates To A Thought, A Cause Separate From Its Effect, He Becomes A Being, Not Being Itself. An Omnipotent, All‐knowing Tyrant Is Not So Different From Earthly Dictators Who Make Everything And Everybody Mere Cogs In The Machine Which They Controlled. An Atheism That Rejects Such A God Is Amply Justified.

God Is Not Good, Or Wise, Or Intelligent Anyway That We Know. So, People Like Maimonides In The Jewish Tradition, Eboncina In The Muslim Tradition, Thomas Aquinas In The Christian Tradition, Insisted That We Couldn't Even Say That God Existed Because Our Concept Of Existence Is Far Too Limited And They Would Have Been Horrified By The Ease With Which We Talk About God Today.

Buddhists Talk About Nirvana In Very Much The Same Terms As Monotheists Describe God.

Eventually, With Regret, I Left The Religious Life, And, Once Freed Of The Burden Of Failure And Inadequacy, I Felt My Belief In God Slip Quietly Away. He Had Never Really Impinged Upon My Life, Though I Had Done My Best To Enable Him To Do So. Now That I No Longer Felt So Guilty And Anxious About Him, He Became Too Remote To Be A Reality.