Heresy, by the way, simply means choice. It came to mean thoughtcrime, implying it was blasphemy to presume to choose your own belief instead of swallowing what the bishops spoonfed you.

The Koran was assembled from a variety of prior Hagarene texts (hence the contradictions re Jesus' death) in order to provide the Moses-like Muhammad with a Torah of his own.

Real morality is not the product of fearing a spanking. But what does fundamentalist hell-belief encourage? It retards any developing moral judgment by freezing moral maturity right at the most primitive, most childish, stage: the fear of retribution-and fundamentalism threatens one hell of a spanking.

Many New Testament scholars have observed that the conception of the resurrection body implied in 1 Corinthians 15 clashes so violently with that presupposed in the gospels that the latter must be dismissed as secondary embellishments, especially as 1 Corinthians predates the gospels.

The born-again gospel promises joy and peace of mind, but it does so by prolonging childhood.

What suggests to non-Evangelical scholars that the resurrection narratives contain legendary accounts? First there is a variety of apparent contradictions in the stories which in any ancient narrative would have to arouse the historian's suspicion.

It is very hard not to see extensive and basic similarities between these (Pagan) religions and the Christian Religion. But somehow Christian scholars have managed not to see it, and this, one must suspect, for dogmatic reasons.

It is quite likely ... that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual. Put simply, not only is the theological Christ of faith a synthetic construct of theologians, a symbolic Uncle Sam figure, but if you could travel ... back to First-Century Nazareth, you would not find a Jesus living there.

Today's Politically Correct historical Jesuses are no different, being mere clones of the scholars who design them.

Fundamentalism fills you with answers before you even think to ask the questions.

One can believe God capable of anything without believing that he did everything anybody may say he did. One can believe in the possibility of miracles without believing that every reported miracle must in fact have happened.

Speculation is not knowledge.

For the believer in divine creation, the open question of the Mystery of Being is like an open wound. It stings and gapes, and the believer cannot rest till it be healed up, closed up, smeared with the soothing balm of an answer, even if his doctrine be a sophisticated one like Aquinas's or that of the latest Liberal Protestant theologian.

You ask me how I know he lives? asks the revival chorus. He lives within my heart. Exactly! A figment.

The Holy Bible. Promoting ignorance and superstition for nearly 2000 years.

Though [Charles Guignebert] could not accept either the Christ myth theory, which held that no historical Jesus existed, or the Dutch Radical denial that Paul authored any of the epistles, Guignebert took both quite seriously.