Religion

The first line of your OP is "FIRST: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created."

You confuse my outrage with hate. Spend countless hours over the years with the victims of clergy sex abuse (not just Catholics), watching their lives unravel as the "church" and its congregations move on to the next hymnal, and maybe you'll ask yourself just how much more we need to study yet another religion before we accept that evil, even when cloaked in religion, is evil. Others may equate my hate of child rape with religion-based hate of homosexuals but I distinguish the two.

Not everyone considers Zen or Jainism religions, in no small part because they are non-theistic. Ask an evangelical, ANY evangelical, about putting humans before god, and I suspect you'll find yourself wanting to clearly distinguish religion . . . and humanism.

I suspect you and I agree on more than we disagree. I am very sorry that my response took a post with a presumptively positive intent down this path.

Please be well.

-Onebro