Some people think prayer stops bullets or rockets or land mines. It doesn't. That's magic, that's not God. Sometimes, you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I do assert that one prepares for eternity not by being religious and keeping the rules, but by living fully, loving wastefully, and daring to be all that each of us has the capacity to be.

The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.

I think one of the things we've got to look out for is human beings claiming that they know how God operates.

The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.

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.

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

I don't want a God that would go around killing people's little girls. Neither do I want a God who would kill his own son.

I prepare for death by living.

You can't have a world where 50 percent of the people are dieting and 50 percent of the people are starving if you want stability.

It’s not about the elimination of fear. Rather it’s about the elimination of the feeling that the elimination of fear is necessary before we take the next step.

Every loving word and action create a far reaching ripple effect - like the waves of the ocean.

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

✵ When I first met you there was a garden growing from a black hole in my mind. ✵

Our own government has become our enemy.

I started thinking about, I need to build a team. And let's go into the strip clubs, and let's tell these girls that it's never too late, that God still will forgive them at any point in their life.

It's much too late to do anything about rock & roll now.

There is no greater crime than desire.

That was the problem with loving people: it made you weak. It made you need them. It made the thought of not having them the worst thing in the world.

I eat eight bags of chips in one sitting, and then nothing for a day or two. I learned that my body thought it was starving, so it would hold on to fat.