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

Pat Robertson said the feminist movement was just a bunch of lesbians who wanted to leave their husbands and kill their children. I quoted him in my book. It's a fantastic statement.

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.

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."

I cannot say my yes to legends that have been clearly and fancifully created. If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter.

It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?

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.