There's one other interesting thing about Western democracy. It didn't arrive at the end point that Karl Marx thought it would that wealth would become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few, that eventually the few would be killed by the many who were deprived, and that a different kind of government would then develop. What happened in Western democracy is that we began to understand that a democratic system can't work if half of the people are starving and the other half are dieting.

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

Anybody who's a mythology ... there's always a fear. That's why we don't like people whose skin color is different, whose eye slant is different, or whose worship is different. It makes them feel insecure. So we strike out. The thing that bothers me most about the Christian church today is that we spend our time confirming people in their own sense of wretchedness.

The Jesus experience expanded people into a position where they didn't have to have defensive tribal lives, "God loves my people, my tribe, anddoesn't like yours." The Bible is full of such references.

We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.

I want to see Christianity enhance our humanity instead of rescue us from some fall. I don't want us to be depending on this supernatural God up in the sky; I want us to recognize that God is part of who we are and that we have to live out the meaning of God with other people. That means we must live in mutual respect and interdependence; it means we have to limit our own desires in order for the body politic to survive.

I experience God as the power of life, the power of love and the ground of being. I don't say that's what God is; I say that's my experience of God.