Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.

What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.

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

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.

The first command given by God when Adam and Eve were pitched out of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis is, "Be fruitful and multiply, and subdue the Earth." We've been trying to do that for a long time, and now the Earth is fighting back. I'm not sure that we're going to survive as a species.

Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me, neither option is worth pursuing.

The great danger... in believing yourself especially chosen is that it becomes easy to view those who are not your people as God's especially unchosen.