The Bible is full of dreadful things. There's a Psalm that says "Happy will you be when you take your enemy's children and dash their heads against the stones." Don't read that to me on Sunday morning and say "This is the word of the Lord." It's like that crazy man down in Alabama who wanted to put the Ten Commandments in his courtroom.

I began to read [Bible] as a critic, an in-house critic. So I got to a place where when I got to the university, I just couldn't reconcile that book and some of its points of view with stuff I was learning in my academic career. And so then you have a choice: either you give up your academic career and close your mind and become a constant fundamentalist, or you give up your religion and become a citizen of the modern world and get a modern education, or just spend the rest of your life balancing the two things together, forcing them into a dialogue.

[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.

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

I am a child of the 21st century.

The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.

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.