This is the model I have in mind as I suggest a few propositions – not for the arguments or discussions they may cause, but simply to consider. The list starts out in quite general terms, and as it progresses, narrows. It’s rather like a city bus, stopping at most corners; and anyone may get off at any stop and let it proceed on its way without him. I’ll try – probably without success – to conceal my personal biases and proceed logically.

The first proposition is that there is a god. I realize that some souls will get off this bus right here at the first stop, which is fine; what follows probably leads to a conclusion they’ve reached already. But the great bulk of the citizens of the United States agree that theirs is “a Christian nation,” which is something you really can’t have without a god.

The second is that God created us. (When using his proper name, I’ll capitalize it; and because I’m old-fashioned when it comes to English usage, I’ll still use “he” as the indefinite pronoun when gender is not discernible.) Whether God created us in six incredible days in 4004 B.C., as the Reverend C.I. Scofield, D.D., claims in his 1909 Reference Bible, or he accomplished it, as many others believe, over the course of millions of years of evolution of increasingly complicated life forms, doesn’t matter. He did it. (I see some people standing up here to get off at the next stop. I wish they wouldn’t just yet, but so it goes.)

Third, if the first two propositions are acceptable, it must follow that what we are is what he intended us to be: a species capable of introspection, spirituality, sophisticated language, science, and conscience. Capable also of naming ourselves sapiens, the thinking creature.

Now, if we read the Old Testament, the generally accepted Western history of our species, we observe an intense, millennia-long quarrel between them and the god who claimed them, as well as constant bloody strife between them and their fellow creatures. They fought vertically and horizontally. The slaughters of the Old Testament (ordered, usually, by God) are as grisly and brutal as any today anywhere in the world.

Fourth: After a few thousand years of death and destruction, victory and subjugation, killing women and children and sowing defeated enemies’ fields with salt, God seemed to feel his creations had evolved to a stage at which they might understand more nuanced and creative relationships. So he sent a young revolutionary teacher into the zenith of the Roman Empire’s power to preach love, forbearance, forgiveness, and peace.

Fifth: Christianity, named after that young revolutionary, is currently the dominant religion of the United States. Politicians invoke it constantly; our money trusts in God with no apparent awareness of irony; chaplains circulate through our armed forces, soothing the psychic wounds of young men and women ordered to kill, and “bringing them to Jesus;” friends of mine calling themselves Christians have told me that “if the [liberal] politicians would only get out of the way and let the military take care of it, we’d clean the bad guys out of there in no time.”

The disconnect between what a majority of us claim to believe and what actions a majority of us endorse is bizarre. Our evolution seems to have ceased with our emergence into consciousness. Why are so many of us who claim allegiance to “The Prince of Peace” so focused on vengeance? Nobody knows, but certainly it seems to be in our genes, to the exclusion of a real desire to mediate rather than exterminate. An article in the April 21 issue of The New Yorker may shed some light on both the innate nature of revenge and its utter hopelessness. Titled “Vengeance is Ours – What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?” it describes life among the tribes of the New Guinea Highlands in which a system of injury and vengeance as mannered as a minuet governs social behavior and keeps everyone in a state of constant vigilance and fear.

The important difference between the Highlanders’ society and our own is that they have no moral qualms about vengeance. It’s normal and expected, and any man who shrank from it would lose face among his fellows. We, however, raise our kids on the Ten Commandments and the Isaac Watts verse, “...little fingers were not meant to tear each other’s eyes.” We induct them, in late adolescence, into a military machine in which their greatest duty is to follow orders and their greatest virtue to guard their brothers’ backs. We teach them to kill, telling them they are the good guys and their foes “the evildoers.” The obvious implication is that their fighting and killing are the work of God, an implication reinforced by the inclusion of religious materials in care packages sent them by Christian evangelical organizations. Most of them come home; but just last year about 2100 of them attempted suicide. Like Ben Franklin, I have no answers to this tragic farce. I just wish there were somebody leading us who would for the first time ask the right questions.