Recovery From Dogma

I recently saw the meme above on Facebook and thought "Ah, yes. To coexist, discuss life, all the things we have in common, our struggles, and all the good things we can do together. How awesome would that be?"  I think John Lennon would approve and love this concept. Who wouldn't? It happens every day around the world; people of different faiths (and none at all) engaging one another in respectful ways toward common goals. What else happens every day around the world? Not this. There are many ways the peace can be broken, but the deepest division happens along the lines that are most meaningful to us. Politics, for example: What values and resources are we going to share for the common good of the communities we live in? And then, of course, religion. Rather than focusing on the good things we can agree on and do together, someone decides to make their personal religious beliefs a mandate for others to accept or else there will be consequences. They could be temporal, po

A friend's post this morning conspired in perfect timing with my own ruminating over life, expectations, disappointments, and moving ahead in a positive direction. His query involved self-loathing as an unavoidable outcome of not living out the salvation his Creator gave him. I responded with a call to look into the root cause of self-loathing and indicated that believing you are depraved, unworthy, and sinful from birth could lead to such self-loathing.  My counter-query is this: Do we all need a savior, even those of us who no longer have faith based in theism? I'm beginning to think the answer is yes.  Some groundwork: What is sin? I'd assert that "Missing the mark" is as good a definition as any. We can argue over where the mark is, whether placed there by God, reality, society, ourselves, etc.  Some versions of Christianity assert that Jesus died for your sins as an atonement and that all you need to do is accept this gift of forgiveness. Some believe it'