For all the shit people happily dump on Christians, I think its easy to forget that American missionaries were part of a settler colonial project intended to steal land and strip mine it for valuable minerals. Like, no shit these people were assholes.

You jettison the Christianity, thinking you're going to purge the rot from the human heart. But all you end up with is a Sam Harris or a Christopher Hitchens. Congratulations, now you've invented secular reasons to bomb brown people, steal their land, and strip mine it for valuable minerals.

People so often lose the forest for the tree. They see a guy with an oversized cross and a silly hat, then tell themselves "Their religion made them think these awful things". But ditching the swag does nothing to peal off the bigotry underneath. Hating on LGBTQ folks, recoiling at people of a different color or weight or gender or age, and greedily exploiting bigotries to plunder a community of its valuables at gunpoint... these aren't religious impulses. They're distinctly human impulses.

At the same time, the innate human desire to bound with other people, to help them in their time of need, to make friendships and build productive communities and celebrate special occasions and even venerate historical idols... these aren't products of religion either. But they are transmitted as ideas through religion iconography and ritual.

You can look past the religious pastiche and see the good and the ill of people.