The great danger... in believing yourself especially chosen is that it becomes easy to view those who are not your people as God's especially unchosen.

Now, if Mary has an egg cell, then Jesus gets 50 percent of his genetic make up from his mother. And if his mother is a child of Adam, she, too,is fallen so Jesus is not perfect.

Paul's words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference.

I've probably read maybe by now fifteen, twenty books on Matthew. I'd say the authors I like best are an English fellow named Michael Goulder, who taught at the University of Birmingham in England, and he writes about the Jewish background in Matthew's gospel, which is part of what I was just talking about, which is just really thrilling to me.

The way you become divine is to become wholly human

I've never met anybody who was helped by being told how wretched, miserable and sinful they are.

I think the story of the Christian faith is how you can become more deeply and fully human, not how you can become religious. And I don't see any indication that being religious makes you more moral.