This article about De Blasio visiting the Vatican made me want to read the Sermon on the Mount, hoping I might be able to use those verses as a baseline for finding commonality with Christians. That went great until:

“anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”

This is terrible, harmful, destructive, wrong-headed advice. No wonder Christians have caused so much damage to themselves and others in the 1500 years since their rise to power in Europe. Even the most gracious excerpt from their Good Book teach you to hate your mind and to harm yourself both physically and psychically when natural processes happen.

And then along came some of the language that strips women of agency in their relationships:

“anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.”

At which point I gave up, for the thousandth time, on finding ways to appreciate more than a few discrete verses from the Bible.