Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past.
You don't take your newborn baby, put that baby on your lap, and say, "Now listen, kid, you were born in sin, you're not worth anything, and you've got to pray for mercy." That's not going to raise a healthy adult. And that's what we do Sunday after Sunday after Sunday.
The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.
I've never known about anyone being helped by being told how wretched, miserable, sinful, and evil they are.
I would like the church to be a place where the questions of people are honored rather than a place where we have all the answers. The church has to get out of propaganda. The future will involve us in more interfaith dialogue. ... We cannot say we have the only truth.
The Bible Belt, the religious South, is the section of the country that practiced slavery until the war made them give it up. They practiced segregation. They practiced lynchings. I don't see any great value in that.
The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title; most people don't put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people.
The God understood as a father figure, who guided ultimate personal decisions, answered our prayers, and promised rewards and punishment based upon our behavior was not designed to call anyone into maturity.
Now, if Mary has an egg cell, then Jesus gets 50 percent of his genetic make up from his mother. And if his mother is a child of Adam, she, too,is fallen so Jesus is not perfect.
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.
The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
If you begin to give people hope that there is a brighter future, there is a new tomorrow, then the people who were yesterday's terrorists become tomorrow's elected officials and they're part of the system.
You need to identify the values that come out of that kind of belief system, because I don't see them. All the polls I look at say, for example, that adultery is committed as much in the Bible Belt as in any other part of the country. The same goes for abortion, child abuse, spouse abuse or murder.
I experience God as the power of life, the power of love and the ground of being. I don't say that's what God is; I say that's my experience of God.
The time has come for us to think of Christianity in a different way. Instead of thinking of God entering human life from outside in the person of Jesus, we have to begin to see human life evolving to the place where it opens itself into an experience of divinity.
Was Judas Iscariot a figure of history? I do not think so. There is no mention of him in any source before the 8th decade.
There's one other interesting thing about Western democracy. It didn't arrive at the end point that Karl Marx thought it would that wealth would become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few, that eventually the few would be killed by the many who were deprived, and that a different kind of government would then develop. What happened in Western democracy is that we began to understand that a democratic system can't work if half of the people are starving and the other half are dieting.
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.
I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.
Now, the fourth gospel says that the moment that Jesus is glorified is the moment he's put to death on the cross, not the resurrection. The moment he's put to death on the cross is when he shows forth glory, and the reason that is, is that he became free enough to give his life away and to love those who were taking it from him. And that's what God is all about. That's the mystical point of view that was hidden from me for years.
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.
Mother Nature is not sweet.
"I do not believe that Jesus, at the end of his earthly sojourn, returned to God by ascending in any literal sense into a heaven located somewhere in the sky. My knowledge of the size of this universe reduces that concept to nonsense."
The way you become divine is to become wholly human
What kind of god is it that some human brain can shatter the illusions that have been built up around such a deity? God's a mystery. I'll never be able to tell you what God is.
