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."

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."

The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.

I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.

In fact, in 1724 the Western world learned that women were co-creators of life that's when it was discovered that women had an egg cell.

I'm not writing for fundamentalists. I'm writing for the people who have been repelled by that kind of thinking and yet who think there might be something they haven't yet discovered.