I think if you're convinced that you're evil, and that God has had to rescue you, then the best you can be is grateful. But nobody ever loves the person they have to be perpetually grateful to. That's just not the way it works in humanity. You need to be set free. You need to be loved just as you are so that you can become all that you can be. That's the direction we have to turn the Christian message; when we do, it becomes universal.

I've never known about anyone being helped by being told how wretched, miserable, sinful, and evil they are.

Now, if Mary has an egg cell, then Jesus gets 50 percent of his genetic make up from his mother. And if his mother is a child of Adam, she, too,is fallen so Jesus is not perfect.

Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

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 think I can tell you how I experience God. I experience God as the power of life calling me to live, I experience God as the power of love calling me to love. That's the God I see in Jesus of Nazareth, that's the God I see in the fourth gospel.

Paul's words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference.