Though I'm not surprised by recent revelations that American soldiers have been abusing Iraqi prisoners, my heart is still torn to pieces. First, to those who would dismiss this as an aberration, please remember that we take young, impressionable people, fill them with rhetoric that they're doing God's work against a sub-human enemy, teach them to kill, give them guns and air drop them across the globe, then act surprised that they act this way. Let's point at ourselves...

It also pains me that so much evil is committed in God's name. It's time to surrender our human inclination to personify Him. As long as we attribute human qualities to Him, we'll continue to project our own weaknesses and fears, using them to justify our behavior. But if we give that up, if we stop seeing God as some entity, then we can't act (supposedly) on his behalf. We can only act on our own. Then we'll be responsible for our own actions and held accountable. God won't go away. He'll just become an ideology of compassion and service to other human beings. He'll become the fabric of the universe, versus some personification of our own deficiencies. God will become morality and righteousness in the true sense.

Of course, we'll have to surrender some of our other uses of him... to explain our existence, to build a mythology, etc. But that's a tiny price to pay, especially considering we'll never know those answers anyway, and seeking them is driven purely by our own ego. That we exist is all I need. Figuring out why is irrelevant. My life's meaning is not in how I got here, it's in who I am from here on out.