Welcome to my Sunday morning sermon. If you start to feel uncomfortable, just stay with me to the end; you may be pleasantly surprised.

This is staggeringly ridiculous, and far more terrifying than foreign terrorists:

Testifying in his own defense, a remorseless and resolute Roeder insisted he had committed a justified act for the defense of unborn children by killing Dr. George Tiller, one of the country’s few physicians to offer late-term abortions. It was a bold legal strategy that, if successful, had the potential to radically alter the debate over abortion by reducing the price for committing such an act of violence.

When it failed, those who share Roeder’s passionate, militant belief against abortion were outraged: One said they are getting tired of being treated as a “piece of dirt” unable to express the reasons for such acts in court.

(Emphasis added.) The anonymous “piece of dirt” commenter may be shocking, but the words of Donald Spitz—who should never be addressed as “Reverend”—are even more chilling:

The Rev. Donald Spitz, of Chesapeake, Va., who runs the Army of God Web site supporting violence against abortion providers, said the rejection of that argument has upset those who view Roeder as a hero.

. . .

Spitz was the spiritual adviser to Paul Hill and was with him at his 2003 execution for the killing of a Florida abortion provider and a clinic escort in 1994, an event that led to a lull in violence at abortion clinics. While saying he knows nothing of impending plans by others against abortion doctors, Spitz scoffed at suggestions that Roeder’s conviction will have a similar effect.

“Times change,” Spitz said. “People are not as passive as they have been. They are more assertive.”

Really? This person who claims to represent “God”—that’s the God of the Christian Bible, for those keeping score, not the God of some other religion—thinks that Scott Roeder, who testified in court that he committed all of the acts necessary to convict him of first degree murder, is a hero. Sure, maybe he is interpreting the Christian Bible “incorrectly.” That’s fine; I’ll give you that (and address it more fully below). But this lunatic and his friends Paul Hill and Scott Roeder are demonstrative proof that believing in God and Jesus Christ and reading the Bible are not magical tonics that prevent people from supporting or committing terrible acts of violence.

Surely my more reasonable religious friends will claim or observe or otherwise argue that “true” Christians, or at least the ones they would dare to associate with openly, are the ones who actually participate, who live within the “community” of believers, both past and present. And that is a perfectly decent thing to say—except for two points you need to consider.

First, even the official or “true” church—whether it’s one with an institutional history that it claims stretches continuously back through nearly two millennia to Jesus himself, or a more diffuse idea of some invisible community of true believers—has failed to prevent its members from committing terrible acts of violence. If we can look back through history and find anyone within your definition of the “true” church who would get along with Spitz, Hill, and Roeder, then you have a problem. (And just defining “true” church from the outset to automatically exclude those people doesn’t solve your problem; you still need to explain why that qualification is necessary.) When you claim that the central message or teaching of your religious group is contrary to these kinds of acts, and when you claim both that your group stands (or should stand) as the ultimate moral authority in human history, and further that those of us outside your group—especially those of us who disclaim any affinity with the idea that rules or guidelines for human behavior must come from a supernatural source—are the ones with a crippled ethical sense, then you must explain how that message, despite its alleged enormous power, and despite your claim that it’s backed by God Himself, failed to keep the violence and lunacy in check. (If your answer is simply that people are weak and sinful, then what good is a religion that amounts to little more than a support group where people can go every week, admit that they are weak and sinful, but keep on acting like jerks and idiots and worse? Why not just close up shop and let people go on being weak and sinful, but without the pretense that admitting it does the rest of us any good?)

Which leads to my second point: If there is any possibility that people have the capacity to be “good” without God—and I present myself as evidence—then you must admit that your “ultimate” moral authority does not require membership, participation, or affiliation with your church, your God, or anything else you claim to offer to humanity. The substantial probability remains that “good” and acceptable conduct that is not socially or psychologically destructive may be governed and defined by the fundamental natural limitations presented by the circumstance of people living together and dependent on each other for their continued existence and well-being. And if that is the source of the limitations giving rise to behavior we call “good” and “moral” and “ethical,” then while you are perfectly free to desire, enjoy, and even benefit from your membership in the church, “true” or not, you have no good reason to demand or even expect that the rest of us should need or want to join you.

And I am not talking about some kind of Dante-esque “First Circle” of hell, for those who “did not sin; and yet, though they have merits, / that’s not enough, because they lacked baptism, / the portal of the faith that you embrace.” (Inferno, IV.) I’m not arguing that you who consider yourselves “true” members of the community of faith according to Jesus Christ should look upon the rest of us decent people with sad but benign approval; I’m saying that if you are “good” or “moral” or “ethical,” too, then it’s for the same reasons that I am—except you obscure those reasons with vestments of theology. If the good and virtuous are defined not by dictates handed down from heaven to people who could otherwise choose to behave and organize themselves by any other principles (go ahead: make lying, theft, and murder the norm!), but by the limitations necessitated by the simple fact that humans live together, in societies, to reap the enormous benefits of interdependence, then saying otherwise, while it may produce an inspiring narrative, does not change reality. Either virtue was arbitrarily defined by God, who could have defined it otherwise, or virtue arises organically from our human experience and God was limited to requiring only those virtues that fit our actual needs.

Maybe God did appear to people long ago and advise them well about their conduct with each other. But even if he did, the simple fact that people have certain ideas about how to behave is not proof that morality is the result of divine revelation, or disproof that morality is the product of the natural exigencies affecting us all, whether we believe in God or not. It’s just an appealing story.

Christianity failed to stop Paul Hill and Scott Roeder, and so far it has failed to stop Donald Spitz from cheering them on. And here I rejoin the views of my more reasonable religious friends—with a qualification. What might have stopped Hill and Roeder, and what still may stop Spitz (though he might be too far gone), is a recognition and understanding of those natural exigencies, the fundamental limits on behavior without which human society would fail to exist. Some of you within your church, “true” or not, may indeed recognize and understand those factors in morality, and being embedded in a past and present community of fellow believers may assist your commitment to behaving well and virtuously. But if that is true, then you are obviously engaged with your world—our world—the immanent one, called “here and now,” and you have not been distracted from the natural exigencies of today by inspired dreams of another world. That is what makes mainstream Christianity, in all its various forms, so inoffensive to the rest of us. Why should it bother me that you believe in God, follow a liturgical calendar, read the Bible, or pray every day, so long as you are not forgetting the people around you, treating them well, paying your taxes, and otherwise participating in society? You can even claim to believe that you are only behaving well because of the content of your religious beliefs: I am still confident that if someone managed to prove that God does not exist, and never existed—even though no one will ever prove that—you would continue to behave in pretty much the same way. Without your reliance on God to tell you how to behave, you would soon, perhaps immediately, discover that there are many, many good reasons apart from divine revelation to behave well.

But if you are one of those more reasonable religious friends, you have the same responsibility as I have to combat the evils arising from the supernaturalist distractions of people like Roeder, Hill, and Spitz. We can disagree about abortion—because there is ample room for disagreement—but there is no room to disagree with the view that people should not be murdering each other because they disagree about abortion. Your responsibility as someone who is engaged with human society, and the natural exigencies and fundamental limitations it presents, even if you maintain religious practice, is to ensure that your practice of religion provides no comfort to those who would allow their dreams of another world to ruin this one. Some of that is built right into Christianity: Jesus told his followers to treat others well, for example. You even have the central story of the incarnation, that the full revelation of your God was completed by the divine experience of becoming human. Those stories fail to explain why people should treat each other well—they only dictate certain behavior—but that doesn’t mean you should fail to provide that explanation.

You Christians, even the more reasonable ones, too easily let your supernatural beliefs slip into a position of primacy such that the dreamers’ distractions—I should say the sleepers’ distractions—and their acts of violence are aided by your failure to address the fact that, even if the contents of your narratives are true, they do not exclude the substantial probability that virtuous behavior is rooted in the natural world, and not the supernatural one. So long as people are allowed to drift away in religious beliefs, unmoored from present circumstances, people will continue to commit violence in the name of your religion. If you want to stop them, then you should be working much harder at adjusting your practice to provide clear and practical explanations for good behavior and the transcendental experience that many people crave. If all you’re doing is saying that people should behave well because God told them to, then you leave the door wide open for the “false” practitioners—the ones you claim to reject—to elaborate their own dispensation of morality from God. Your limp replies that they are misinterpreting scripture will never succeed against those lunatics because your scriptures are so heterogenous and diverse that no one will ever agree on the exact, perfect, and unambiguous interpretation of what they say. You must do something more if you want to prevent people like Roeder, Hill, and Spitz from carrying on their dangerous and destructive activities in the name of your religion and your scriptures and your God.

If you have made it this far, you should have noticed a few things. First, I am not advocating the destruction of religion (only that reasonable religious people pull their heads out of the sand about the effects of their laziness). Second, I am not claiming that religion is the source of evil in the world (just that it has perennially failed to prevent evil). Third, if you prefer to maintain your practice, then I am quite certain that the suggestions I offer fall squarely within the mainstream of your tradition: is there anything in your scriptures that prohibits you from examining the world and striving to understand why people ought to behave well?

Believe what you need to believe, but don’t let religious beliefs become excuses for failures of virtue.