Amazing that anyone can write such drivel.

Amazing that someone can write such an empty sentence.

Meanwhile why not check out these references which provide a comprehensive all-inclusive Illuminated Understanding of the human condition in the "21st century.

http:///www.beezone.com/up/dogmassoicalmorality2.html
Check out sections 1, 3, and 4 of this long essay too.

Unfortunately for everyone the kind of dim-witted entirely exoteric institutional "religion" or religiosity that Sells promotes reduces everyone and everything to the fear saturated mortal meat body scale only. The first Three Stages of Life. It does not even begin to take the totality of the human body-mind-complex into account especially the 4th, 5th and 6th stages of life.
This reference describes the situation
http://www.beezone.com/7stages/7_stages_of_life-2.html

Furthermore most/all of what is now promoted as "religion" is patterned and controlled by the now universal doubt-mind which patterns and controls every minute fraction of human culture. This reference ( http://www.dabase.org/doubt.htm )introduces the 1984 book The Transmission of Doubt.

http://www.adidam.org/teaching/gnosticon/universal-scientism
The above essay was originally titled The Psychosis of Doubt

Cumberland. Absolutely agree and couldn't have put it better. I mean, if J.C had been a member of Morrison's belief system? Instead of whipping the moneychangers out of His Father's house. May have consulted them on the exchange rate, or some such?

What Sells misses, I believe, is the (falsely) assumed authority/relevance and the power that gave unelected (power-hungry, control freak) "church" officials?
Alan B.

The most annoying kind of religion possible, that automatically assumes it knows best, and anyone who disagrees must be "missing" out on something.

I have deeply religious friends, but none would presume to insult me like this

"Christianity, and Judaism before it has always been about the future. Time is understood as being linear and directed towards the establishment of the kingdom of heaven/God on earth."

Distorted vision and unrealistic expectations are a recipe for disappointment.

What a fool would hope that one day all schools will evolve into universities? Who would then teach the little ones?

Time in school is cyclical and so it should be - every year the older pupils mature and leave, the others advance to the next grade while new young ones fill in year 1.

Also in school, in order to advance, lazy pupils must be prodded and unless they occasionally feel unpleasant, they will fail to move on.

A good teacher watches with satisfaction as generations of students pass through their school, mature and leave. They ask for no more.

Human life on earth is better likened to a school. Earth will never become heaven, nor should it and suffering will never be eliminated because it is part and parcel of the process of learning.

Society ought to be based on truth, not on fantasy. True leadership ought to facilitate personal and spiritual growth so as to help us graduate and move on to live with God in heaven, not here (except for those who then volunteer to remain here as teachers).