The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person.

That's why the virgin birth never gets rid of the human mother. The story only gets rid of the human father. So Jesus' life was the life of God nurtured through the Virgin Mary. That's because the virgin birth died as a literal story as soon as we discovered that women had an egg cell. It's interesting to watch what the Roman church did about that.

The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

Matthew is the only gospel that uses the Sermon on the Mount, for example, because that's the new Moses making a new interpretation of the law on a new mountain. So then you begin to put all these things together, and I don't know how you can make sense out of that book if you don't know the Jewish background.

I've probably read maybe by now fifteen, twenty books on Matthew. I'd say the authors I like best are an English fellow named Michael Goulder, who taught at the University of Birmingham in England, and he writes about the Jewish background in Matthew's gospel, which is part of what I was just talking about, which is just really thrilling to me.

One of my professors said to me once, "Any god that can be killed off will be killed, but if I can shake up your faith in your god, it means you already don't have much of a god."

In the private arena, you can do whatever you wish, and people do. These crazy evangelical preachers get on the radio and TV and say incredible things.