“My students sometimes ask: what is a fundamentalist? I give them a very simple definition.”

I have such a fantastic life that I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it. . . . But I don’t have anyone to express my gratitude to. This is a void deep inside me, a void of wanting someone to thank, and I don’t see any plausible way of filling it.

No other author, biblical or otherwise, mentions this event. Is it, like John’s account of Jesus’ death, a detail made up by Matthew in order to make some kind of theological point?

The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew

Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.

[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally.

In Matthew, Jesus declares, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” In Mark, he says,“Whoever is not against us is for us.”

In terms of the historical record, I should also point out that there is no account in any ancient source whatsoever about King Herod slaughtering children in or around Bethlehem, or anyplace else.

In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet.

Traditionally in Christian circles, Judas in fact has been associated with Jews. Of being traitors, avaricious, who in fact, betray Jesus, who are Christ-killers. And this portrayal of Judas of course also leads then to horrendous acts of anti-Semitism through the centuries.

I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it’s silly to talk about him not existing.

You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to.

A fundamentalist is no fun, too much damn, and not enough mental.

The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don’t want to go there.

As time goes on, thing do get made up.

Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes pure and simple slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.

In fact, most of the changes found in early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology.

Football is a simple game made complicated by people who should know better.

My pitching philosophy is simple. I believe in getting the ball over the plate and not walking a lot of men.

One thing is that life’s great moments evolve from simple acts of cooperation with God’s mysterious promptings-nudges that always lean toward finding what’s been lost and freeing what’s been enslaved .

Only simple ideas can be held by large groups of people. Commonly held ideas are almost always dumbed down until they are practically lies… and often dangerous ones.

There are no guarantees in life. The simple twists of fate and the breaks of the game are the two maxims that define so much of the success and failure in life.

With the increasing importance of standards for system-level objects such as COM and CORBA, it is particularly important that the C++ bindings to those be clean, well documented, and simple to use.

I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.

The main problem with this great obsession for saving time is very simple: you can’t save time. You can only spend it. But you can spend it wisely or foolishly.