Thanks for your insights. I believe that most of what we create, as individuals and as a culture, are profoundly influenced by our biological inheritance. Somali Christians, ethnically Jewish Christians, and European Christians each made very different things out of Christianity. A lot of what Europeans made out of it would have been made by us anyway even if Christianity had never existed, and even I find much to admire and appreciate in the common law, the Gothic cathedral, and the Bach concerto.

I love the sound of an ethereal choir singing praise to Divine Providence in a beautiful hall of marble that reaches to the sky. But they were singing just so in Rome and Athens, too, you know, a thousand years before the Middle Eastern faith was imposed on us.

I see the really poisonous part in Christianity's forced attachment to all things Middle Eastern and especially Jewish, which, along with the morality of racelessness implicit in the creed (what you "believe" is important, what you actually ARE is nothing), makes us powerless and frozen into inaction in the face of our deadliest enemies. That fatal flaw, along with the fact that the Bible just ain't true, made me seek for something better.