Humanity is meant to worship That Which Is Sacred (God) in many different ways.

I think you may have been confused by what I meant by "spontaneous". My point was that I and most secular folk believe the emergence of life on Earth was a remarkable event, but occurred spontaneously, i.e. something like: some primordial goo was struck by lightning, forming the most simple microorganism, and from then on it was natural selection, punctuated equilibria and so on that accounted for the increasingly complex and intelligent creatures that came into being. If one subscribes to this account of the emergence of life, then we are not "meant" to do anything because our existence is due solely to chance. In order to claim we are truly meant to accomplish things, there needs to be a supernatural element. If you remove the supernatural element from the debate topic, it could be something like "People naturally like things humanity has deemed good/important, and it makes sense that there's variation." It seems to me that removing the religious overtones from the statement makes it tautological and boring. It was already kind of circular to begin with because "that which is sacred" could easily be defined as "that which has been deemed worthy of worship." The etymology of "worship" is definitely interesting, but I think what is far more relevant to this debate is how it is used today. It's a very religiously charged word. To me, and many others I suspect, it means to have unquestioning faith in, love for and deference to something, and I'd hope the religious folks reading this would agree. While I am very devoted to certain moral principles, I don't worship them, and I think that's normal. To clarify, I don't think it's bad or offensive that you used religious language in the debate topic, but I think it makes it much harder to defend because in addition to the underlying moral concepts of tolerance and love that I agree with, you also need to defend that a deity of some sort exists, and that we are meant to worship it. "There are plenty of people who would state that they think it is beneficial for everyone to be tolerant and loving, BUT... BUT, you are going to hell if you don't worship God the same way I do... BUT, you are stupid and lazy if you believe in an afterlife... BUT, I will be afraid of you if you read a Qu'ran." Then they're hypocrites, aren't they? Similarly, if someone states that they agree with your thesis then says those things, they're a hypocrite as well. "So it would be ok if people just respected their doctrines above their respect for reason and compassion? I think solemnly respecting and cherishing IS worshiping, and there is no difference between these phrases. I agree completely that worshiping doctrine (being fundamentalist) leads to tragedy and evil. But this is not pertinent to the central thesis of the debate. It would be sad if in our attempt to avoid worshiping doctrine we became too scared to ever worship anything. I am arguing that humans are meant to recognize and express reverence for the things that matter in our lives in many different ways. I chose to state this in a more compact way by saying worship." As said above, the important distinction I want to make is to me, nothing is above doubt or scrutiny, and doubt and scrutiny are antithetical to worship. ps: unitarians are cool