I joined a group of adults for an evening of theological discussion. The topic assigned to us had to do with the relationship between our sense of Christian faith and the struggle for power which will crescendo on November 5th.

Christianity is inherited from late antiquity. I suppose you are acquainted with the stories. The faith is a variant of an ancient desert religion, featuring an all-powerful, all-knowing deity, that demands the sacrifice of a son to assuage punishment. A moral violation(s) must be compensated. I almost forgot to mention the deity is all-loving too. Punishment and love, an offer that humanity cannot refuse…

Thus the Lucy and Charlie Brown football meme captures our condition.

Martin Luther King Jr. is often quoted: “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Surely King was not speaking with irony… Perhaps where the arc-of-the-moral-universe is headed remains to be seen. Since that depends upon us, – it could go either way.

All truly active men
now do without inward Christianity,
and the most moderate and thoughtful men
of the intellectual middle classes
possess only a kind of
modified Christianity;
that is,
a peculiarly simplified
Christianity.

A God who,
in his love, ordains everything
so that it may be best for us,
a God who gives us our virtue and our happiness
and then
takes them away from us,
so that everything at length goes on smoothly
and there is no reason left
why we should
take life ill or grumble about it:
in short,
resignation and modesty
raised to the rank of divinities

—that is the best and most lifelike
remnant of Christianity now left to us.
It must be remembered, however,
that in this way
Christianity has developed into a soft moralism:
instead of “God, freedom, and immortality,”

we have now
a kind of benevolence
and honest sentiments,
and the belief that,
in the entire universe,
benevolence and honest sentiments
will finally prevail:

this is the euthanasia of Christianity

The Dawn Of Day, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 90