I think the worst way to go is to have somebody think they speak for God. If you look at history, every nation that has operated as if it spoke for God has become violently destructive.

I don't like to talk about it in those terms; it's impossible to describe who or what God "is." Suppose you were a horse, and you were asked to describe what a human being was like. You couldn't do it.

Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy are the two ecclesiastical versions of this human idolatry. Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long- range future of anyone.

So who is God? No one can finally say. That is not within human competence. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God, doing our best to dispel our human delusions. Let me try to do just that. I experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully and thus to respect life in every form as embodying the holy.

I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of heaven to play golf.

Was Judas Iscariot a figure of history? I do not think so. There is no mention of him in any source before the 8th decade.

Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past.