Religion kills folks dead

I'm nearing the end of my patience with American Christianity. It is the enemy of progress. It is a bleached sepulchre containing only dead bones. It is the milstone hanging around my neck.

My soul is dead today. And there is good reason for progressives to feel so. Our country follows the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, false prophets of the religious and political right. Even the mainline churches are stuck in the sediment of past traditions, proclaiming a theology of the past, no longer relevant or appealing to enlightened minds.

What enlightened person could possibly think that God could mate with a human virgin? (What was it like for Mary? Did she orgasm? Did her hymen break? Was there blood on the sheets? What was it like for the Holy Spirit? Did the Spirit achieve orgasim? Did He have a smoke afterward?) The virgin birth worked for early Christians living before they knew anything about sperm, eggs and zygotes. It certainly doesn't work for us today. It yields the kind of ridiculous musings I've just joked about. It is unappealing, even dangerous baggage from the past. Should we go on to mention original sin, substitutionary atonement, the deity of Jesus, the bodily resurrection? Certainly Christians have better things to do than shovel this compost.

It would be so refreshing to be surrounded by curious minds, open to new experiences and new expressions of the soul.