Respect Only Has Meaning As Respect For

If Your Understanding Of The Divine Made You Kinder, More Empathetic, And Impelled You To Express Sympathy In Concrete Acts Of Loving-kindness, This Was Good Theology. But If Your Notion Of God Made You Unkind, Belligerent, Cruel, Of Self-righteous, Or If It Led You To Kill In God's Name, It Was Bad Theology.

The More Aggressive Our Ideologies Become, The More Aggressive Our Discourse Whether It's In The United States, From Washington D.c., Or Whether It's From Tehran, Or From Some Underground Al-qaeda Cell. The More Aggressive That Discourse Is, The More People Of Moderate Persuasion Have To Organize And Speak A Voice Of Compassion. That Means To Feel With The Other.

Theology Is-- Or Should Be-- A Species Of Poetry,which Read Quickly Or Encountered In A Hubbub Of Noise Makes No Sense. You Have To Open Yourself To A Poem With A Quiet, Receptive Mind, In The Same Way You Might Listen To A Difficult Piece Of Music... If You Seize Upon A Poem And Try To Extort Its Meaning Before You Are Ready, It Remains Opaque. If You Bring Your Own Personal Agenda To Bear Upon It, The Poem Will Close Upon Itself Like A Clam, Because You Have Denied Its Unique And Separate Identity, Its Inviolate Holiness.

It Is Not Difficult To Find A Religious Justification For Killing.

It Is People Who Are Violent, Rather Than "religions"; And Since We Secularised Our Politics We Have Had Two Major World Wars, The Holocaust, The Soviet Gulag, And The Atomic Attacks On Hiroshima And Nagasaki - None Of Which Were Inspired By Religion. If We Want To Understand The Dangers Of Our World, We Can No Longer Accept The Old Received Ideas.