They amuse themselves by playing an irrelevant ecclesiastical game called "Let's Pretend." Let's pretend that we possess the objective truth of God in our inerrant Scriptures or in our infallible pronouncements or in our unbroken apostolic traditions.

It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?

Religion is a mixed blessing.

...secular journalists... tend to accept uncritically the oft - repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti - gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro - slavery and anti - women.

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'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."

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.