The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.

What does happen constantly with all kinds of people I meet is they say "I had this encounter with Jesus, can you help me understand it..." The labels, more than ever, simply aren't big enough to contain what the cosmic Christ is up to in the world.

Everybody is following somebody. Everybody has faith in something and somebody. We are all believers.

Sociologically, large groups of people don't generally have massive changes in their belief instantaneously.

Many of the most significant moments in our lives come not because it all went right but because it all fell apart

What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live?

Look at the size of the universe and look at what we're discovering about string theory. There's a wide-eyed sense of we're just getting started here.