I get letters every week from people who live in rural Texas or rural Mississippi and who feel totally alone. They feel like they must be the strangest person in the world. They don't fit in to the religious milieu of their communities. It doesn't make any sense to them. They read some of my columns and they know that there's somebody in the world at least as crazy as they are, and so they write and say is there anybody else?

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.

I know Jerry [Falwell] fairly well, and he's probably not bright enough to recognize all of the implications of what he said.

In fact, in 1724 the Western world learned that women were co-creators of life that's when it was discovered that women had an egg cell.

If you're really thinking prayer can stop rockets or bullets, you have to ask why some people do get hit by rockets or bullets. Are they people who no one prayed for? Are they people who God just didn't like? I don't think so.

Theism, as a way of conceiving God, has become demonstrably inadequate, and the God of theism not only is dying but is probably not revivable. If the religion of the future depends on keeping alive the definitions of theism, then the human phenomenon that we call religion will have come to an end. If Christianity depends on a theistic definition of God, then we must face the fact that we are watching this noble religious system enter the rigor mortis of its own death throes.

The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title; most people don't put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people.