What kind of god is it that some human brain can shatter the illusions that have been built up around such a deity? God's a mystery. I'll never be able to tell you what God is.

There are some great values in Christianity, but I think the values are located more deeply in our humanity than they are in our religion. There are certainly some survival values.

...death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.

If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.

The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person.

[Jew] didn't believe anything good could come out of a Jewish study. So, what has happened is anti-Semitism has cost the Jews their lives and their property. It's also cost the Christians the ability to read the old gospels, which are deeply, deeply Jewish, and to bring that out is a pretty exciting thing. I'm having a wonderful time with that. I'm just not near ready to do much with it.

I was raised pretty much a fundamentalist, but the one thing that fundamentalism gave to me was the love for that book and a commitment to read and study it. The difficulty is that I've read it all, I didn't skip around, I read it all, and when you read it all, you can't take it literally because you don't want to blame God for a lot of stuff that occurs in that book. There are some pretty violent scenes.