The Discarded Benefits of the Christian Religion

The Christian religion solved a very thorny problem for us. Being moral by nature we needed to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. It demonstrated clearly that no one we know is as bad as ourselves. We are, undeniably and individually, the villains. This gave people a useful moral compass and helped to temper our relations with each other with mercy. In our modern sophistication we ditched outmoded, primitive religion being too grown-up for it. Still needing, however, to orient ourselves in terms of who the heroes and villains are, the only model left is the Marxist one that tells us anyone with authority or responsibility at the top of a hierarchy is an exploiter and an oppressor. So we attack and blame those people wherever we find them or, if we find that we, ourselves, by some inexplicable accident are them, we apologise abjectly and conduct public self-flagellations. All of this is a route to ensuring that we end up as the heroes - the opposite to what we are. It also means that virtually every relationship we have is now configured in terms of condemnation and finger-pointing.