Up on the ladder

In his book "Losing Faith in Faith", preacher-turned-atheist Dan Barker writes:

Every Christian has a particular hierarchy of doctrines and practices, and most Christians arrange their hierarchy in roughly the same manner, with the existence of God at the top, the deity of Jesus just below that, and so on, down to the bottom of the list where you find things like wearing jewelry or makeup in church. What distinguishes many brands of Christianity is where they draw their line between what is essential and what is not.

Extreme fundamentalists draw the line way down at the bottom of the list, making all doctrines equally necessary. Moderates draw the line somewhere up in the middle of the list. Liberals draw the line way up at the top, not caring if the Bible is inerrant or if Jesus existed historically, but holding on to the existence of God, however he or she is defined, holding on to the general usefulness of religion, and to rituals, which many people claim to need despite its irrelevance to reality, to give structure or meaning to life.

Put another way: it's as if we're all standing on a giant metaphorical ladder. Fundamentalist Christians are at the top and liberal Christians are at the bottom. Problem is, regardless of where a person exists on this ladder, he/she invariably feels the need to justify his/her position and spew vitriolic hatred towards anyone located on a different rung.

But in the words of master theologian Thom Yorke:

I've been climbing up this ladder
I've been wasting my time
Up on the ladder, out of time to escape
Up on the ladder, we wait for your mistake
Up on the ladder, trying to crawl out the way
Up on the ladder, you're all the fucking same

Indeed we are.