All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

If you begin to give people hope that there is a brighter future, there is a new tomorrow, then the people who were yesterday's terrorists become tomorrow's elected officials and they're part of the system.

The Jesus experience expanded people into a position where they didn't have to have defensive tribal lives, "God loves my people, my tribe, anddoesn't like yours." The Bible is full of such references.

That's why the virgin birth never gets rid of the human mother. The story only gets rid of the human father. So Jesus' life was the life of God nurtured through the Virgin Mary. That's because the virgin birth died as a literal story as soon as we discovered that women had an egg cell. It's interesting to watch what the Roman church did about that.

Plenty of people out there think of me as the Antichrist or the devil incarnate because I do not affirm the literal patterns of the Bible. But the fact is I can no more abandon the literal patterns than I could fly to the moon. I just go beyond them.

The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

In supporting argument for segregation, Paul [the apostol] addresses the people in his epistle to the Colossians, and he tells them how to treat their slaves. "Slaves, obey your masters. Masters, be kind to yourslaves." Paul was in favor of a kinder and gentler slavery; it never occurred to him to raise the question about whether slavery itself was immoral.