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.

It's not going to be a straight upward progression, but there's no doubt that consciousness is growing. Prejudices die regularly in the Western world. We don't burn witches anymore.

I don't want a God that would go around killing people's little girls. Neither do I want a God who would kill his own son.

In that process of coming to know that which we name as divine, the God who is love is slowly transformed into the love that is God. Let me repeat that...We breathe love in, and we breathe love out. It is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. It is never exhausted, always expanding. When I try to describe this reality, words fail me; so I simply utter the name God. That name, however, is no longer for me the name of a being.

The thing that intrigues me about Matthew is that I don't believe anybody would read it if they aren't Jewish and understand it. And so to say that publicly as a Christian is kind of interesting.

I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being."

[Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who made us face the fact that the primary way we tell the Christ story doesn't work anymore.