An atheist's sermon on Luke 7: 36-50 delivered at Saint Joan of Arc in Minneapolis, Minn., on June 12, 2016.

Forgiveness is a universal need, among those of us who are not religious and among believers in every religion on earth. We must forgive each other our differences, and we must forgive much more difficult occurrences.

Some things we can forgive easily -- by which, of course, I mean eliminating resentment from our hearts, not granting an eternal reward. If someone kissed my feet and poured oil on them and begged me to forgive her, frankly, I would have a harder time forgiving the kisses and oil than forgiving her a life of prostitution -- which is, after all, not an act of cruelty toward me but the violation of a taboo into which she was likely compelled by hardship.

But to forgive men who were torturing and killing me on a cross? That I would be very unlikely to succeed at, especially as my nearing end -- in the absence of a crowd to influence -- might convince me of the pointlessness of making my last thought a magnanimous one. As long as I live, however, I intend to work on forgiveness.

There is a long history of social critics and progressive thinkers offering critiques of human society.

Among those who are better known, Karl Marx offered a critique of capitalism, anarchists have critiqued the state, Mohandas K. Gandhi offered a critique of industrial society, Sigmund Freud and Herbert Marcuse offered critiques of civilization, and feminists have critiqued patriarchy. In addition, critiques of colonial/industrial society by indigenous people, critiques of white society by people of color, critiques of modern industrial society by environmentalists and cultural historians as well as critiques of technocratic society by a succession of scholars have been presented.

While these and other critiques have much to offer, if we want to trace the origin of the dysfunctional and violent human behaviours that now threaten human extinction, I believe it is necessary to examine what has been happening since the Neolithic (agricultural) revolution some 12,000 years ago.

The most likely way to die in a U.S. war, by far, is to live in the country that the United States is attacking. But the most likely way in which a U.S. participant in a war will die is by suicide.

There are a couple of widely observed top causes of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops returning from recent wars deeply disturbed in their minds. One is having been near an explosion. Another, which has been around longer than explosions have, is having killed, having nearly died, having seen blood and gore and suffering, having imposed death and suffering on innocents, having seen comrades die in agony, exacerbated in many cases by having lost faith in the sales pitch that launched the war -- in other words, the horror of war making.

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The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft

By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

"The 'strip and flip' technique of controlling electronic elections can easily apply to citizens of all faiths and color. But in the US, race has been the critical tool for dividing the populace. It’s the bottom-line basic instrument that makes electronic election theft possible." ~ Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis 

"What had happened between 2000 and 2004 was the Help America Vote Act. Meant to correct problems with Florida paper punch-card ballots, it was fraud capacity disguised as reform. It encouraged the buying of electronic voting systems as the solution to federal mandates. The hope that true reformists had was that computers would prove colorblind. Instead, computer counting made us blind. We no longer see our votes being counted. As in any darkness, nefarious schemes are much easier to accomplish." ~ Mimi Kennedy, in the Introduction