This coming Easter morning, many people will rise and look east. Some will go to a Christian church for their only visit this year. Many will be reminded by priests and preachers that this one day is not enough. Those strangers to churches will be telling the oldest of religious truths: it is the people, not the priests, who make the gods.

“Easter” we call the day, namesake of a deity of the Northlands, Eostre, goddess of the dawn. English speakers still call the direction she arises from “east.” She is the goddess of new beginnings and of fertility, her day celebrated as the earth comes back to life after a long winter.

The holiday (holy day) called Easter is a movable feast, tied to both the cycles of the sun and of the moon—Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox.

Religious holidays are celebrations of recurrence. Children in the Northlands have been searching the wet, awakening grass for eggs on Easter morning for thousands of years. The celebration has spread to other lands; to other religions. To the far corners of the planet.

Nineteenth Century German philologist Jacob Grimm reported that in some remote German villages of his time people still celebrated Eostre with sword dances, bonfires, and the baking of “heathenish pastries.”

It’s difficult this time of year—at least in the top half of the Northern Hemisphere—not to think of new beginnings. Difficult not to dance just a little bit. The iron grip of the deathly ice is finally broken and life is emerging from the long-dead earth again.

This is one of only two days the so-called “C and E” (Christmas and Easter) Christians—also known as Chreasters—fill churches. There are something on the order of eighty-five million Chreasters in the United States.

Statistics indicate that less than one-quarter of US Christians attend church even once a month. But Easter brings ‘em out—even more than Christmas or Mother’s Day(!). Why? Might it be because Easter is such a blend of religious traditions?

Reflect on the potpourri of religions and cultures that make up the concept of Easter as it is celebrated in the United States today. We have a fertility goddess from Northern Europe who survived the invasion of a Southern European tradition, Christianity, based on a Middle Eastern tradition, Judaism, itself an amalgam of religious thinking from the earliest agricultural civilizations of Mesopotamia with a pinch of Zoroastrianism from a certain Babylonian captivity thrown in.

All those ideas added up to create a lunar holiday celebrating a solar god in a myth echoing human sacrifice that originated in Egyptian mythology concerning the god Osiris, a metaphor for the planting and growth of vegetation in the Nile delta.

All that adds up to Easter brunches. And chocolate.

Why Easter? Why is Easter Christianity’s greatest hit?

“Syncretism” is one of those ten dollar words that permeates theology. The word describes the human propensity for combining religious ideas from various traditions.

The poet Wallace Stevens—an atheist by the by—made a very good point when he said, “The people, not the priests, made the gods.” Yes. The people, not the priests, meld ideas to create their religions.

Reflect on one of the greatest failures of human history. In 1231 the Roman Catholic Church opened its Office of Inquisition, nowadays known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Yes, it’s still in existence. Yet, after nearly 800 years of terror and cajoling, there are more heresies now than ever.

Wallace Stevens continues to be correct: the people, not the priests, make the gods. And we the people continue to vote with our feet. And the more information that flows on our nets and our webs, the more people are going to . . .  well, what are we people going to do?

Some will become Cheasters. Some double-belongers. Some nones.

Return to the case of the goddess Eostre. The story goes that Pope Gregory the Great was walking one day in a slave market in Rome. This was in the 600’s CE. Pope Gregory saw a couple of blonde slaves and asked his handlers where blondes came from. The handlers said they were Angles, which at the time meant either the English or Northern Germans. The pope was so taken with these blondes that he decided to devote his life to converting the Northlands to Christianity.

In 601 CE Pope Gregory instructed the missionaries he was sending to England with these words:

. . . the temples of the idols in those nations ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed.

For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed . . . may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they are accustomed.

Syncretism. Gregory’s order was an act of genius. It was a strategy that led to a Christendom that included the far North. But it also introduced a blue note; a note of mystery. Were those people out in the country—“paganus,” pagans, which means “villagers” or “rustics” in Latin—were those pagans, were those people of the heath, those people of the wastelands, those heath-ans—were those away from the centers of power, away from the army and the police of the king and pope and bishop—were they really Christian? Or were they going to their old temples for other reasons?

No one ever knew for sure. And we never will know. But is it a coincidence that the largest concentration of atheists on the planet today . . . happen to live in those Northlands that Pope Gregory Christianized?

Syncrenism. The people, not the priests, make the gods. In computer speak, it’s called Open Source: people with different agendas; different talents; different points of view, all have access to a program. And the result is a better program than those developed through controlled access. Maybe that’s why Easter is Christianity’s greatest hit.

The people, not the priests, make the gods. Religions are the oldest open source software.

Living in your own private Idaho

 underground like a wild potato

 The B52s

You’ve heard about the “Goldilocks Zone,” that temperate place where H2O exists in the form of water and scientists speculate life might exist on other planets. I think a Unitarian Universalist congregation should be a Goldilocks Zone where the free exchange of ideas concerning ultimate meaning and purpose flows like life-giving water.  After all, the fourth principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association is, “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”

Now, I know that actually the UUA principles are only agreements between congregations, underlining the right of each member congregation to respect the particular theological stance of the various congregations. But, in practice, these principles have been embraced more by individuals within congregations than between congregations, where there is pressure to conform to the franchise—a topic for another day.

I mention this because the congregation I serve, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, has historically embraced humanism and has its own set of aspirations, the fourth of which is, to “support one another’s journey toward meaning and connection in the here and now.”

That’s a more humanist slant than the fourth principle of the UUA, but aimed toward the same ideal, a Goldilocks Zone for the free flow of ideas concerning ultimate meaning and purpose. This is the ideal. As with most ideals, the congregation falls short in reality.  But reaching toward an ideal is a good thing. That’s what ideals are for—to stretch us.

Three methods help get us to the Goldilocks Zone:

Hit the pause button on being right.

Hang your inner judge and jury.

Trust everyone’s path.

Easier said than done. But one way to get there is to become a pragmatist. As in the philosophy called Pragmatism. Sure, you can remain an idealist or a cynic or whatever in other matters, but try pragmatism when it comes to creating a Goldilocks Zone.

Listen to what psychologist and Pragmatist philosopher William James had to say about that most contentious of issues, theism:

If believing as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.

Now, by “free will,” James meant “non-theist” according to the theological understandings of the time. In that light, consider what he said again:

If believing as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.

A pragmatist is a Pragmatist due to a deep skepticism concerning the human ability to ascertain ultimate truth. Since Pragmatists aren’t sure we can do that, they put air-quotes around “truth” and examine not what a truth is but how it affects human behavior.

In that light, notice what William James is saying: belief in a god or belief in no god works when it works. When it “gets us the results we want.” Whichever way we choose, the path we are on becomes “pragmatically” true.

If we can get there, we’re in the Goldilocks Zone for multi-faith communication and understanding.

This way of thinking led William James to write his great book The Varieties of Religious Experience, which makes most short lists for the greatest work of non-fiction in the Twentieth Century. And this way of thinking creates the Goldilocks Zone for both the free and the responsible search that each of us must make for truth and meaning.

Notice that this pragmatic approach accomplishes all three of my criteria for the Goldilocks Zone:

Hit the pause button on being right.

Hang your inner judge and jury.

Trust everyone’s path.

“But wait: my path is better!” Just add a couple of words to that statement: “My path is better FOR ME.”

“But my beliefs are objectively true!” No: your beliefs are objectively true FOR YOU. Both pragmatically—and scientifically—objective reality is always subject to further examination. The Pragmatists knew this in their bones.

Consider the words of a couple more great Pragmatists. Philosopher George Santayana said, “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval by discerning and manifesting the good without attempting to retain it.”

Let it go.

Consider the words of Pragmatic philosopher John Dewey: “Growth itself is the only moral end.”

Who am I—and who are you—Dewey points out, to judge the religious and philosophical understandings of another person? Maybe you have a PhD in religious studies. That’s great. Maybe you were born UU and have a very open mind and no emotional baggage about religion. Bully for you. Remind yourself: anyone who walks into a Unitarian Universalist congregation for the first time is saying, “I need to think about this ultimate meaning and purpose stuff. I’m not satisfied with the off-the-rack, one-size-fits-all answers.”

Remember that NONE of us have the ultimate answers. The answers that work for others. I don’t have all the answers. I’m still thinking. And as a minister I get paid to think about these things. I thought about titling this, “What I Really, Really Think About God (this week).”

Try this: avoid going “underground like a wild potato.” Share your subjectivity but remember that it is a subjectivity, and we all live in some kind of private Idaho. Insisting on our own rightness leads to an icy world; saying there’s only one way leads to a steamed planet.

The Goldilocks Zone, where the fresh water flows, is only possible when we get outside our own stuff and listen.

I.

In addition to the Unitarian Universalist Seven Principles, the congregation that I serve as minister ascribes to a set of aspirational statements that  are specifically humanist. Our first Aspiration is, “To live joyfully and ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature.”

Why do we say such a thing?

Because we are countering a long tradition of life-denying dogma common in the Western world. Doctrines such as that of Original Sin are not an affirmation of life in this world, and, in our view, that’s the only life there is.

You don’t have to go farther than our bulletin board to see an implication of what we mean. Just now we have a poster advocating “sex-positive reproductive justice.” We are countering a culture in which sex-negative attitudes impact the fundamental rights of women.

In my blog post last week I discussed Dostoyevsky’s assertion of free will:

“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy . . .”

Well, it’s certainly “joyful” to do “one’s own fancy,” but such actions may not meet the ethical or “reverent relationship” criterion. Dostoyevsky’s definition of free will, the freedom to really mess things up, is a negative assertion of freedom. There’s always a the poles: Sex-negative. Sex-positive. Freedom-negative; freedom-positive. Navigating those can be problematic. And traditional Western religions are the problem, not a solution.

How to be sex-positive and life-affirming. That’s why UU congregations take OWL, Our Whole Lives education courses, so seriously. We have this “one wild and precious life,” as poet Mary Oliver puts it, and we have to figure out how to live it here, now—as ethically, lovingly, and reverently as possible.

In Dostoyevsky’s time philosophers were grappling with the implications of the discovery of Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician, who realized that the numbers of births, deaths, house fires, crimes—even the types of crimes—proved to be fairly consistent from year to year. Predictable, in other words.

This led to both the insurance industry and the field of sociology, among other things. My inability to diet and the number of people who die of heart attack and stroke each year in the United States has some connection, now, doesn’t it?

The insurance industry certainly sees a connection.

Unlike in Dostoyevsky’s time, we don’t think much about it nowadays when we hear how many Americans will die of Type II Diabetes or high blood pressure this year. Nowadays we are saturated with statistics. So much so that, with the addition of computers, we live in the next iteration of statistical analysis: “big data” or “predictive analytics.”

Netflix can tell us what movies we will enjoy with a high degree of accuracy. Amazon can send us discounts for things that the crunched data indicate we will consume next. I love a sentence I read about predictive analytics: “Analytical Customer Relationship Management can be applied throughout the customer’s lifecycle.”

Think about that: “Analytical Customer Relationship Management can be applied throughout the customer’s lifecycle.”

So when you start getting coupons for caskets . . . watch out.

It makes me want to go Dostoyevsky’s route and buy something REALLY crazy.

II.

One of the oddest things I have to deal with in multi-faith work is answering the accusation that humanists don’t have a “theology of sin.” As in, “you don’t have a theology of sin, therefore . . .  you’re just not all that serious about religion.”

To which I’m tempted to say that humanism doesn’t have a theory of onomatopoeia either.

It’s not that humanists don’t understand what people are talking about when they discuss onomatopoeia, it’s just that it lies outside the purview of a humanist ethic.

It’s simply that I don’t put any credence in the idea that people are born into a “fallen state.” As far as I can see, a “theology of sin” has a lot of baggage that just has nothing to do with reality. It’s a complicated answer to a simple question: Why do people act like animals?” When St. Augustine came up with his theory of Original Sin, people didn’t know that human beings were animals. Call it self-denial. But now we do.

How could an animal that has evolved a consciousness such as we have be “fallen”?

I think that anthropologist Robert Ardrey put it best:

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. (African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man, 1961.

Claiming that “original sin” is not a true description of reality is in no way saying that human beings are “born good,” any more than saying “I have no vacuum cleaner” means that I can’t clean my floor.

Original sin is a theological concept that serves theological ends. And it is a complex answer to a simple question that does not survive Occam’s Razor.

There’s nothing original about sin. But there is something very original about acting up to human aspirations toward ethics and compassion. We are risen apes, not fallen angels, and we are “armed killers” besides. That is a considerably clearer place to start considering how to be ethical, loving, and reverent, it seems to me.

Allow me to take a crack at a humanist theology of sin, necessarily taking into account evolution. How about this: “Sin” is a lack of cooperation with others.

Looked at from this angle, Dostoyevsky wasn’t defining free will, he was defining actions that do not take others into account: “One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice . . . one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy . . .”

Excessive drinking; smoking; eating too much—these aren’t “sins.” They’re merely really bad behaviors, given what we know about their outcomes. Those seven deadly sins—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, gluttony—they’re bad for the self and they are bad for others.

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.” Too often our incredible reason and creativity has been allowed  to invent sharpened sticks . . . and a few other things to kill each other with. This is “sin”: it is a lack of cooperation and compassion for others.

Our challenge is to look reality in the face and do what we can with what we’ve got.

That tale of the Garden of Eden is a good story, but it has led to some bad behavior. Sin isn’t very original.

Allow me to take another shot at a humanist theory of of sin:

Some things, such as what have been called sins, are the default settings on the human body. The out-of-the-box model, so to speak. But every car enthusiast knows that if you want more performance, you’ve got to get yourself an after-market muffler. Human ethics are like that.

Our aspirations toward living “ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature” are mostly after-market add-ons.

OK. So I know that my metaphor doesn’t have the sizzle of two naked people and a talking snake. (That’s good writing!) Still, my metaphor is truer to the human condition.

We are risen apes, not fallen angels. We are prone to un-original appetites, irresponsibility, and killing.  Still, we can aspire “to live joyfully and ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature.”

Not bad for a bunch of primates.

I have a terrible confession: almost all of the calories I consume in a day, I consume after 8pm.

No, I don’t cook extravagant dinners late at night. Far from it. I eat junk.

I’m not proud of it. I know that eating late at night is the worst sort of thing for my health. I have talked with my physician about it. I’ve talked with therapists. I’ve talked with nutritionists.

I have even stopped doing it for, oh, two or three days at a time.

As a matter of fact, the thought that I shouldn’t do it goes through my head each evening. Right before I head for the fridge.

And the knowledge that I shouldn’t do it . . . adds to the rush I get when I do do it.

This is a terrible confession. But you who have not sinned may hurl the first stone. Perhaps binge eating doesn’t appeal to you. OK. But something does . . .

Something you know you shouldn’t do. Bacon. Scotch. Pistachio ice cream. Gambling. Driving too fast. Drunk-dialing your ex. Sex. Drugs. Doritos.

Something.

Yes, you know you’re going to face-palm when you wake up the next morning. But you just can’t stop yourself.

Many Christians blame it on “original sin,” but a quick survey of the wreckage around us shows that sin isn’t all that original. You who have not sinned may hurl the first stone.

OK, so I know that’s not what St. Augustine meant by the “original” in “original sin.” But there is certainly a connection between those seven deadly sins—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony—and the sort of thing I’m talking about. They are all things we do because they come naturally. Each is an easy answer in the immediate moment, though each is fairly clearly not good for us in the long run, if by “good” we mean . . . well, what? Our animal selves?

Why do we fall so easily into those patterns of behavior described as the “deadly sins”? St. Augustine thought that it’s because we’re born that way—we are born into a fallen world. I don’t think St. Augustine’s answer quite survives Occam’s Razor—it is not the simplest explanation by a long shot.

But the fact remains: why do we do what we know we shouldn’t do and that we know we will regret?

Despite the fact that he’s been dead for a hundred and thirty-three years, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky still has the best explanation, I think. His insights continue to challenge our most sacred of cows.

In his time, most Europeans believed that humanity had finally rounded a corner, and that the human future would be determined by rationality and reason—the greatest good for the greatest number.

Dostoyevsky was there to say this was not the case . . . and never will be the case.

Of all the reflections on why we human beings do what we do, from philosophers to neuroscientists, Fyodor Dostoyevsky still gets my vote for the deepest insight concerning why human beings make the choices we do:

“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.”

Dostoyevsky knew that the “most advantageous advantage”—for me that’s losing twenty pounds—the “most advantageous advantage” is NOT what might be reasonable and “right.” Rather, the “most advantageous advantage” is our exercising what we see as free will—making a “capricious” and “unfettered choice.”

Dostoyevsky asked,

“And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice?

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”

Why? That’s the question we ask in those face-palm moments: Why? Why do we do that?

Philosopher Crispin Sartwell puts it this way: “When you consult your experience, the fact that you are a body is more obvious than that two plus two equals four.”

There: I think that’s it. And that’s what Dostoyevsky knew is the case: The physical trumps the reasonable. Virtue. Reason. Those don’t feel like independent choice, do they? They feel, well . . . wholesome. And wholesome, like two plus two equals four, doesn’t feel real, doesn’t feel embodied.

Isn’t the concept of original sin merely a complex way of saying that human beings are born with bodies?

And isn’t this the wellspring of so much of Western thought? Our dualism, our denial of the body?

The doctrine of original sin is all about how merely being born with a body, merely entering this world, makes us sinful. Fallen. Dirty. In need of redemption.

Well. Maybe you don’t buy that. But, when we turn the terms into “head” and “heart,” which do you think is more important? Which should predominate? Isn’t one about me staying in my chair and the other about my trip to the fridge?

Perhaps most people nowadays don’t think that the mere fact of embodiment— em-bodi-ment—the Latin prefix “em,” meaning “put into”—we perhaps don’t think that the mere fact of having a body has us on the highway to hell. But it certainly puts us in the way of some bad choices, doesn’t it?

Consider some other “em” prefixes: em-brace, em-bryo, em-barrassment. Fleshy stuff, isn’t this “em,” this being “put into”? Getting into a body appears to put us into quite a fix. I’m reminded of that Punk classic from Richard Hell and the Voidoids: “It’s a gamble when you get a face.”

I think that the most damaging idea in all of Western philosophy and religion is the body / mind distinction.

It led to the belief in a distinction between the body and the soul, which I think is a psychologically damaging and completely erroneous idea.

It led to the erroneous idea that consciousness itself is somehow distinct from the functioning of the brain.

These errors permeate Western thinking. Perhaps it’s easiest to see in the statement, “I have a body.” How could a human being possibly “have” a body? We can “have” a beer or a smoke or a snack or a new car. We can even have an opinion. But we don’t have a body: we ARE a body.

Rather than “I have a body,” the truer way to say this is, “I AM a body.”

Yes, Dostoyevsky said, people are capable of realizing the advantageous—what is good for us. But this knowledge, far from leading to rational decisions, shows us instead the way to REALLY mess things up.

I feel, as I head toward the fridge, liberated. I feel as if I were practicing free will. But am I? Or am I merely playing out my enslavement to one of the seven big sins, gluttony?

Dostoyevsky understood this dilemma. He was ruinously addicted to gambling. Still, in a world full of human beings whose actions can be predicted by statistics, what can we do? The irrational.

As Dostoyevsky had his Underground Man put it,

“The formula ‘two plus two equals five’ is not without its attractions.”

More next week . . .

I suppose everybody has a favorite founding document for a religion or a nation. Mine is “Farewell at Delfshaven,” a sermon given by Rev. John Robinson to a group of his Separatist congregation who were taking ship for the Western Hemisphere. Part of the sermon goes like this:

I Charge you before God and his blessed angels that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as you were to receive any truth from my ministry, for I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from His holy word.

The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw. Whatever part of His will our God has revealed to Calvin, they (Lutherans) will rather die than embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented.

For though they were precious shining lights in their time, yet God has not revealed his whole will to them. And were they now living, they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light, as they had received.

The way Unitarian Universalists “do church” comes directly from the protestant movements that eventually led to the English Civil War and the decision by some of the radicals that it was perfectly acceptable to God that they supplant the aristocracy and remove their king’s head. . . Radical. It isn’t surprising that the royalty of the day weren’t particularly keen on keeping those sorts around. And perhaps it isn’t surprising that these most protesting of Protestants eventually set up theocracies and felt justified in clearing the land of its native inhabitants.

Yet these radicals—known to us nowadays as Pilgrims, Puritans, and Separatists—were up some positive things as well, such as what we call democracy. And the best of their thought is exemplified by these last words that Rev. Robinson said to members of his congregation as they sailed to England to join another group of dissenters and board the Mayflower.

These parishioners settled in what they called Plymouth, Massachusetts to build what is today a Unitarian Universalist church, which indicates that the beliefs that Rev. Robinson preached, plus about four-hundred years, equals Unitarian Universalism. The deepest beliefs of those religious seekers are the DNA of Unitarian Universalism (for good and ill).

Notice some things about this little sermon: yes, there’s the usual unfortunate bashing of other denominations—in this case Lutherans and Calvinists—but Rev. Robinson was saying two very radical, and I think positive, things.

The first is: “follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ.” This is still an expectation in the Unitarian Universalist movement: we don’t ordain ministers and then think those ministers are somehow levitating or holy. We don’t think our ministers are special—we expect our ministers to walk the walk . . .  all the time, but a minister is just like the rest of us folks.

The other radical thing that Rev. Robinson preached is the very core of the tradition: that truth continues to be revealed. Or, more radically, that we human beings continue to find more and more truth, and we must continue to modify our beliefs according to these new truths.

The Separatists did not “do church” as did most of the Christian groups of the time (and still today). Roman Catholicism had developed along the lines of the political systems of the day: emperors, kings, men in charge. Some protestant groups—Lutherans and Anglicans for example—created state religions. These groups saw themselves—dangerously as Rev. Robinson pointed out—as founded on eternal truths. This justified building hierarchies. Top down.

The Separatists, however, believed in the individual discovery (or revelation) of truth. Therefore, they could not accept hierarchy within the congregation. Each member of the congregation was on a separate path toward truth, and as likely as any other member (including clergy) to find it.

As a corollary, the churches the “pilgrims,” and eventually Puritans, set up in Massachusetts were all individual as well. Each congregation discovered truth for itself. This is one reason the Separatist movement eventually fractured into Trinitarian and Unitarian congregations.

Still today, each congregation in the Unitarian Universalist Association is on its own, to choose leaders, to find their own way toward truth. And the “power,” whatever that is, lies within the congregation, not the association of congregations.

Not an ideal way to run a collection of congregations, a “denomination,” of course, but a great way to encourage freedom of conscience and thought.

Yes, the radical protestant movements of Europe were “precious shining lights in their time,” but nowadays, the belief systems they were founded on are for the most part relics of the past, products of minds “who yet saw not all things.” And, as Rev. Robinson said, “This is a misery much to be lamented.” I, for example, as a minister, don’t use the terms “God” or “Christ” at all in my historically humanist congregation. The light has shown my congregation a different path.

That’s the genius of the idea Rev. Robinson preached: truth just keeps on coming.