The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.

We have to start at ground zero and ask what it means to have a real connection with God and what it means to pray. We have to recast our whole understanding of God. We live on the other side of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, a whole group of people who have recast the way we think about reality.

We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.

When I look back at the Christian faith, I see that we have had to retranslate, almost reinvent ourselves a number of times.

We live in a very pluralistic society today. There are Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, atheists, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and Christians like me. There are a wide variety of religious expressions in this country. I think they all must be treated with respect and none of them must be given priority in the public arena.

You can't have a world where 50 percent of the people are dieting and 50 percent of the people are starving if you want stability.

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.