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.

Matthew is the only gospel that uses the Sermon on the Mount, for example, because that's the new Moses making a new interpretation of the law on a new mountain. So then you begin to put all these things together, and I don't know how you can make sense out of that book if you don't know the Jewish background.

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.

Anybody who's a mythology ... there's always a fear. That's why we don't like people whose skin color is different, whose eye slant is different, or whose worship is different. It makes them feel insecure. So we strike out. The thing that bothers me most about the Christian church today is that we spend our time confirming people in their own sense of wretchedness.

I think I could make the case for any kind of organized religion, but I'm not an expert in those, so let me narrow my focus to talk about Christianity.

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.

I began to read [Bible] as a critic, an in-house critic. So I got to a place where when I got to the university, I just couldn't reconcile that book and some of its points of view with stuff I was learning in my academic career. And so then you have a choice: either you give up your academic career and close your mind and become a constant fundamentalist, or you give up your religion and become a citizen of the modern world and get a modern education, or just spend the rest of your life balancing the two things together, forcing them into a dialogue.