It's not going to be a straight upward progression, but there's no doubt that consciousness is growing. Prejudices die regularly in the Western world. We don't burn witches anymore.

Our problem is not that we're fallen; our problem is we haven't become human yet. The question is, what can make us human, so that we can give life away and give love away and not be grasping after trying to protect our own lives all the time? That's the way I see the Jesus story, and I think it's a powerful and profound story.

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.

You can't go to church without praying ten or fifteen times for God to have mercy on you. You can't sing "Amazing Grace" without reminding yourself that the reason God's grace is amazing is it saves a wretch like you. This self-denigration stuff - Jesus died for my sins - is nothing but a guilt message. That's the thing we've got to get out from under. That's not Christianity. That's sort of fourth-century Christianity that got turned into doctrines and dogmas that we've never been able to escape.

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.

Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don't think that's the case.

We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves.