If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.
Because I was suspicious of the traditional Christian church, I tended to tar them all with the same brush. That was a mistake, because there are righteous people working in a whole rainbow of belief systems - from Hasidic Jews to right-wing Bible Belters to charismatic Catholics.
I did study religion for a little while. I studied the Torah and the Holy Koran, Helios Biblos, which is considered by most people to be the Holy Bible. I just wanted to know, even with Buddhism and the Dalai Llama.
In the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.
Jesus was not this wimpy little guy who walked around munching sunflower seeds and saying nice things to people. The real Jesus of the Bible said, 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.' That is: Obey the government.
Death wasn't part of God's original plan for humanity, and the Bible calls death an enemy - the last enemy to be destroyed.
Ministers should be Bible students. They should thoroughly furnish themselves with the evidences of our faith and hope, and then, with full control of the voice and their feelings, present these evidences in such a manner that the people can calmly weigh them, and decide upon the evidences presented.
I'm a classic Church of England member, but part of its strength is the fact that it doesn't ask us to sign up to too much of a canon... but I've always found the teachings of Jesus and the Bible quite useful as a sort of handy guide.
Certainly a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.
I don't claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I'm home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, 'Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.'
When I was in elementary school, I was a big fan of the zip-off pants that could be turned into shorts. The Delia's catalog used to be my bible.
I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness.
My book centers in on the New Testament, the goal being to help a person who wants to understand the Bible to see how what God did as revealed in the New Testament will reveal to them their own personal story.
The more people marginalize the true God of the Bible, the more chaotic things become.
The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
I hear people all the time say, well I read through the Bible last year. Well, so what? I'm all for reading through the Bible. But how much of that got on the inside, or did they just cover three more chapters today? I would never discredit reading the Scriptures, but it is important to meditate on it.
The Bible is pregnant with politics. You cannot read the Bible from Genesis through Revelation and go through too many chapters that are not involving politics.
The Bible app is designed to make absorbing the Word as frictionless as possible. For example, to make the Bible app habit easier to adopt, a user who prefers to not read at all can simply tap a small icon, which plays a professionally produced audio track, read with all the dramatic bravado of Charlton Heston himself.
In the Bible it says they asked Jesus how many times you should forgive, and he said 70 times 7. Well, I want you all to know that I'm keeping a chart.
Guys that preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible - that is just cheating. It's cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn't how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that.
