The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is “What do these stories mean?
Trump is a narcissistic sociopath; he's doing exactly what he said he would do.
You can be a follower of Jesus and not necessarily be a Christian.
Maybe when the President tells you that you should be afraid of Mexicans or Muslims or Jews or black people or gay people or trans people, you'll realize that those are just labels, that underneath it all we're all the same people, we all have the same aspirations, the same hopes, the same desires, that we all share the same values.
If the resistance is going to bring Trump down, it will require Democrats to follow the people, not the other way around. My hope is that the Democrats will realize where their power lies, and will start taking their cues from the people on the ground and not the other way.
It's politically impossible, as you know, for any member of Congress to make a public statement condemning or criticizing the policies of Israel. It would be political suicidal for them to do so. A lot of the members of Congress agree with me, some very high up in the Congress. But if they came out publically and said it, their seats would be in danger.
The Israelis have not been willing to take the crucial step, and that is to withdraw from the Palestinian territory, the West Bank. And this is a crucial point and Israel has not only kept increasing the settlements in number, but have built highways among all the settlements from which the Palestinians are now excluded.
The first week or day that Obama was in office, he made it clear that peace in the Middle East would be a high priority for him. And his choice of a special envoy, George Mitchell, compared to the previous special envoys chosen, is remarkable.
Well I wouldn't want to tell Obama specifically what to do, but obviously he's already promised publicly and privately, both before and after he was elected president, that he was going to open up communications with Iran.
My advice for Obama concerning Iran is just to do what you already promised you would do, open up communications with Iran. Which is what I did after the Shah was deposed, as you know when the revolutionary government came in, I still had diplomatic relations with Iran, otherwise the hostages wouldn't have been there. We had about, as you know, 60 some diplomats in Iran, they had about the same number in Washington.
We need to do whatever we can, legally and within our power, to remove Donald Trump from office as fast as possible before something serious happens in this country.
Trump is not presidential: this is not normal, it cannot be treated as normal. We have to fight with our last breath to make sure that the vision for the country that this racist white nationalist Bannon has cannot be achieved in this country. We are a country that, whether he likes it or not, is about to become the first nation in the world that is majority minorities.
I think that in many ways, some of those who did vote for Trump are sorry that they did so. But the hope, at least, is that we have a chance to make up for those kinds of mistakes.
I have not ever met Donald Trump, and I plan to go my entire life without ever actually having to breathe the same air that he breathes.
I'm interested in the origins of the religious experience, how the history of religion has evolved over the last umpteen thousand years, and where religiosity is going in the future. I think that's a topic I've been chewing on for a few years; I would love to eventually work on and produce a book out of it.
Mike Huckabee and indeed many of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. have far more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than they'd like to admit, in that all of them very much want to see a role of religion in society.
In the history of the prophetic biblical canon that starts with Genesis, the Koran is by far the most tolerant of the views of other religions.
The truth of the matter is that when you write about religion like I do, you're writing about something that people take very seriously.
I've taught the Bible all my life and I believe in the rights of Jews to have a place in the Holy Land, and so I have a natural affinity for that right. I believe that the right of Israel to have a place in the Holy Land can be honored by the two state solution, to abbreviate a long premise, and I think the only way to have peace is by following the basic road I've been following for the last 30 years, to try to bring peace to Israel through negotiation.
The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's a product of the scientific revolution.
A majority of Israelis want to give up the West Bank for peace, and obviously the same thing is desired by the Palestinians. The strong voice of the president of the United States will have a major impact on public opinion, not only in this country, but also in Israel and also in Palestine.
You have almost zero chance of being killed by a refugee in America. You have almost no chance of being killed in a terrorist attack by an immigrant - by any kind of immigrant, let alone an Islamic immigrant.
No- one is ever told any story but their own.
The bad news is that Iran wants to talk about everything except their nuclear program. They want to talk about regional cooperation, they want to talk about the sanctions issues, and it seems like the western powers want to talk about nothing more than the nuclear issue.
I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.
