You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

            For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

            You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

            The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

            Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

            For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”                    

That 17-line chapter has composed the entirety of my parenting philosophy. Everything has been to respect the inalienable entitlement of both of my sons to dignity. They are who they are, and most assuredly they are not me. Above all else, they know as a mantra from me that no one more important than either has ever breathed earth’s air, and, likewise, they are no important than anyone else on the planet.

_Chris and Andy are now in their 20s. Neither has been baptized, and to the best of my knowledge, neither has ever been in a church. It isn’t that I was or am in opposition to such visits, only that, if they elect to visit one, that they provide themselves equal opportunity to be introduced to every religion, that they study each religion’s premises and tenets critically for flaws as well as truths before they conclude a decision one way or another. I never cared what that decision was, so long as it was one drawn from as objective analyses as might be possible.

Regardless I readily admit my prejudices, I doubt two more honorable, more ethical, more moral, more “Christ-like” young men ever traipsed the earth. Ever! Neither loathes much, but what they loathe deeply is any form of bigotry; racial, ethnic, gender-based, sexual orientation based; whatever.

But why this memo now? Because now, as ever before, I am confronted daily with a surfeit of evidence of both little restrained and completely unrestrained racial and ethnic hatred running through the veins of this country; as if by some measurement one group was superior to another. And the least spot of retention of that odious and entirely false proposition is an extraordinarily perilous spot for a state to be in.

Two truths. The first and foremost prerequisite to hatred is fear. Psychologically, it is utterly impossible to hate what one does not first fear. Thus, the first task, it seems to me, for the one who finds the merest mote of hatred infesting his or her heart is to take a good, long look in the mirror, and ask what it is about the object of their hate that frightens them so.

The other truth is to religion. By definition, religion requires that the advocate eschew a scrupulous, open-ended let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may, search for evidence on behalf of certain tenets that are to be believed above all else. Again psychologically, it just is not possible for a person to compartmentalize his or her most ingrained tendencies; I’ll look here, but that other room is one the door of which I will never permit myself to open. Why not push that door open? What are you so afraid of? And let’s be 100% blunt: a god that is responsible for the creation of the universe isn’t much of a god if he/she/it cannot handle one of its most puny of creations asking the most profound of questions. “If you didn’t want me to look, you shouldn’t have created me with a brain and a limitless sense of curiosity. So, even if my inquiry leads me to conclude you do not likely exist, if you do exist, my conclusions cannot make you not exist. So why are you so terrified, what I might come to believe? You that unworthy or insignificant that your sense of self depends on me?”   

Three highly dangerous falsehoods I’d crush if I could.

One falsehood is that there is some abiding, necessary relationship between religion and morality. There is not. No people needed a commandment not to steal to know that theft of someone else’s property was bad behavior. All anyone ever needed was possession of an item to realize the pain of loss they would feel were that item to be stolen.

Another falsehood is that a god gave us, or gives us or anyone freedom. That’s not true at all. The freedoms Americans enjoy were, for all practical purposes, enumerated and elucidated during the European Enlightenment by intellectuals on all sides of the theistic continuum; Christians, Jews, spiritualists, agnostics and atheists. And what secured those freedoms was the blood of Christians, Jews, spiritualists, agnostics, and atheists. Some belief in a god sustained some. Others simply had an overriding hunger to believe and conduct their lives however they were wont. It wasn’t a god. It was lead bullets fired from muskets, perseverance through the most trying times, and considerable assistance from France.

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