The foundation of law and morality is mutuality. It’s embodied in the golden rule. Preemptive action in the world that does not take into consideration the rights of other nations and the cooperation of other nations is basically against that basic moral principle.

Law and morality share that idea of mutuality. I find it really ironic that India thinks that Pakistan is supporting terrorism. And I think the evidence is clear that it is. And using our policy of preemption, India should have gone to war against Pakistan a long time ago. They’ve lost just as many people to terrorists’ acts, and yet we use preemption in Iraq but we counsel the Indians to follow the moral and legal way. I find this very, very troubling and that’s why I was against when it started, against the war when it was going on, and I’m still against our presence there because I think we’ve broken international law and we’ve broken the golden rule at an international level. Sets a very bad precedent.

There's a sense of disappointment and a letdown about my adopted land and an enormous arrogance of power on the part of my country, and that is very discouraging.

I don’t understand the inconsistency -- when we launch a pre-emptive strike against Iraq and ignore the weapons of mass destruction in Korea. That bothers me, the inconsistency there.

My feelings are kind of mixed. When you look at international law and to what philosophers and theologians have said about war, typically speaking there’s got to be some kind of imminent threat. We’ve talked about principles of self defense, we have to respond with proportionate force and when there’s a threat to your country, action has been taken, or a threat to other nations or there’s a threat to the innocent. And that’s an imminent threat and there’s no other alternative but war. A final last resort. And you’re forced that your response is proportionate. That kind of makes up the basic rules of both international law and I think what philosophers and theologians have said about a just war.

My feelings were the same in the beginning as they are today. They’re really mixed. I guess I’m still waiting. For me the jury is still out. And what I was hoping we’d see before this, is a president that would go to Congress and go though and establish these basic principles. And not just say well you know Iraq is connected to Al Qaida, Iraq is an ally, Iraq has given them resources.

You know, I really wanted the evidence, and I didn’t want possibilities. I wanted the evidence to be clear and convincing so that I could feel that there was some connection to 9/11, or there was some imminent threat — the use of force against us or other countries — and I’m still waiting for that. So to me this war could be a just one, it could be an acceptable one. But since that evidence has not been presented I don’t feel really comfortable that it’s going to be.

And I think that’s there’s an incredibly slippery slope here. It’s not just for other nations but even for us. We’re changing the rules in the middle of the game. And now we’re starting to talk about, well whenever you anticipate, or you think some country has the ability to harm others, then that justifies going in.

This idea of anticipatory self defense seems dangerous, seems dangerous on a number of levels.

I guess I think about what Jesus said, “Blessed are the peace keepers,” and I think what that really means is, you have to do everything you can to maintain peace, to pursue every available option with peace. Now, there does come a time when I think you have to engage in war but that threat has to be imminent, your response has to be proportionate, and I’m just wondering if we’ve adhered to those principles and I feel some obligation as a citizen to force our government to follow these principles.

Relationships between nations, individuals, have taken decades to build. And I can just reminisce a little on our NATO days; people don’t really understand the inner workings of NATO today. But we’d all sit around, fifteen [nations], sometimes sixteen with France, and work out common ground. And generally speaking we had a consensus and everybody would go along with the consensus and it would be funded. And the economic considerations were important. They were satisfied, but it seems like the government recently has been sort of a, kind of iconoclastic. They’ve been tossing treaties away, and tossing institutions away as they need to serve their purpose. Americans as a whole are very forgiving. They can make friends, break friends and renew friendships. A lot of these countries don’t do it. They have always had suspicions about the United States. Those suspicions have been suppressed because they looked at the overall good. And I think there are many, many countries, in fact every country outside of this country, they’re right now re-assessing their relationship with the United States, determining whether they are going to be a friend or not a friend. And these, I think, will be, if not permanent, long-term biases that the next and the next and the next administrations are going to have trouble overcoming.

I have never felt we had a real excuse to go in and I question Mr. Bush’s reasons for going in. He is allied with the military industrial complex through his family and through the people he has selected to advise him. And it seems as though the excuses he gave have one by one disappeared. They haven't proved to be valid. For instance, weapons of mass destruction haven't been found. And I feel like we’ve destroyed our relationship with many of our allies and those relationships were built at great trouble over many years. And I think we have lost our standing in the court of world opinion.

Religiously, I think we have a duty to rule out evil in the world if we can, personally and as a nation.

We had a man and a regime that were not nice folks.

I think comparing that to the cold war with Russia and the USSR is two different things altogether. It's like trying to speak nicely to a rabid dog.

I think September 11th was a big wakeup call for me. It said to me, "Uh oh, we're vulnerable, right here." And I began to look at our vulnerabilities -- the oil supply, the ability to have electricity, the ability to have communications -- those things can be disrupted in a minute. And I think the administration recognized that and I think this pre-emptive strike stuff is an attempt at changing the nature of national defense. I think it's still an experiment, there could be ramifications from it that we don't see -- I think it's a reasonable experiment to be taking.

I think our form of freedom is very fragile and I think if we wait until the threat really develops itself, it may be too late.

I think the deeper religious commitment that I have is to preserve what good there is in the world and to ally myself with efforts towards what is quote “good,” as opposed to supporting or enduring the bad.

I'm sure that many of you read on the internet today -- it was kind of a sick joke -- "We know there were weapons of mass destruction because we have the receipts for them." Because we have all seen pictures of Saddam Hussein and Rumsfeld shaking hands, buddy buddy. And I wonder what has changed? I mean he was never a nice guy and we’ve been able to live with that. And I think if there were available weapons of mass destruction he would have used them.

I really haven't watched the news. I turned off the news tonight as President Bush was on the aircraft carrier, because to see the glorification of what we have done . . . I've seen pictures of the children who've been killed. In fact, I can't look at that either because there were a lot that died in the World Trade Center, but we kill 45,000 a year in our cars, in our automobiles, and I just think there are so many inconsistencies in our policies. I think Collin Powell is the bright spot in this administration. The brighter spot.

I believe that war is incompatible with the teachings and example of Christ. And he said, "Love your neighbor as yourself," and he told us to pray for those who persecute us. That’s where I come from.

There has to be a yardstick, and my faith is in God and scripture. It tells us that there’s a difference between personal peacemaking and turning the other cheek and so on, and a national incident. And the Bible says that the government doesn’t wield the sword for nothing, and that’s a government's main job, to protect its citizens.

We can't fight evil in the world, we can't fight the threats against us unless we are strong and sometimes we have to show the strength.

We talk about pre-emptive strikes, and I’m sure it was a pre-emptive strike because we were attacked on September 11 and there was great feelings and information and intelligence that there was a connection between Saddam and Al Quaida.

I think we made a terrible mistake by starting up a war with Iraq. I think that violence almost always leads to more violence. I’m not the kind of person, even though my religion tends to be very non-violent, I’d have to say that there definitely are times when you have to defend yourself and the issue, “just war” is really the heart of our conversation. I don’t feel it was just. And when Colleen was talking about the photographs of children that were under bombs in Iraq, I had to think that we were no different than those who bombed the world trade centers and I don’t feel that there was a proven connection between Al Qaida and the Iraqi government.

I would like to also stress that after 9/11 and during what has escalated along the lines of this war, there also seems to have been a move towards lack of personal freedom. Suddenly people are afraid that they will be somehow harmed, or if they stated their opinions that they’re going to have to back down, and that’s something that makes me very sad. And I’m really glad that we are here today, and that we do have different opinions and that we aren’t at each others’ throats. Because it’s tremendously important that we do and if there is something that I do want to fight for — fight for now — it is the freedom to say what we want to say in terms of this war, whether we agree with it or don’t agree with it.

I think one of the things that faith requires all of us to do is realize that whatever kingdom there is, and whatever our religious beliefs are, it is not a kingdom that only lets in Americans, it's not a kingdom that only lets in people from Saudi Arabia, it’s not a kingdom that only lets in people from Asia. I mean, it’s a kingdom where we're all brothers and sisters. And at some level we do have to sit back, I think, and just ask our government to keep in mind that there are some wars that are just, and they're probably even necessary, maybe a necessary evil. And I hark back to those principles we talked about before. They're really in line with kind of those self-defense principles, but you asked the question, 'Is there a time when war would be justified?' I actually think that when 5,000 people were killed by virtue of chemical weapons through the Iraqi regime, that the U.N. had a clear justification to go in and use force.

There probably are some situations where we can’t wait till the last minute until the nuclear bomb is ready to go off, and I think anticipatory self-defense -- if you look at some of Michael Walzer’s elements -- those things make some sense to me. But those things we’re really established in this particular situation. Maybe I’m going to learn that they are. I’m still waiting. And I’m hoping.

Since the end of the Cold War, we are the only show in town in terms of military force, a sort of superpower status.

When you’re the only show in town that way, when you’re perceived as the top dog, you’re a target for everyone as well.

There is a sense of an American empire. There is a sense that we have this position de facto, whether we wanted it or not. So it’s there and so we’re in this rather interesting position which carries with it a greater moral responsibility, but it also goes both ways -- one is that you can’t just sit around and wait for somebody else to take care of problems.

We have been at war for a long, long time and been blind to it. And I would submit that it is a religious war down to its very core. There is no doubt that the Muslim world, the Islamic world, has seen the US as a principal protector of Israel and it really wouldn’t matter what we did via Iraq, vis-a-vis Iraq, or anything else. We would still be seen as anti-Islam and anti-Arab world and that tension has played out over many, many years and so it’s not just something new on the horizon.

In this process of losing the bipolar Cold War scenario, the UN has really lost its relevance. It’s also become spineless.

I’m not happy about us going to war. I’m not even sure if it’s a just war, but I know in the scenarios our options narrow dramatically. And while we can get all teary-eyed about children being hurt or something, you know, that was happening in Iraq prior to our invasion in huge ways. It’s sort of like, you know, how many children do you want to let die there under his regime before somebody acted? It’s sort of like how many Jews do you let die in Germany before you do something about it?

We are the lone superpower in the world. That makes us even more, is more incumbent upon us to make sure that we do adhere to international law. And if the U.N. is such a weak institution, we are obligated by article 6 of the Constitution that any treaties that we sign become the supreme law of the land. The constitution is very clear. That’s why it was not just an empty gesture that some people called for the impeachment of President Bush, because the U.N. charter is part of the supreme law of the land. Our military forces took an oath on the constitution. These are very serious matters and we cannot have any moral force in the world unless we at least attempt to go by international legal standards.

I have to say that the situation in Iraq today, take our intervention out of it, ok, I’m happier about it from some sort of fundamental sense of justice and for what the potential is.

We have people who would be opposed to war and I would guess many of you would have been opposed to war no matter what. So it would’ve been one of those things where it would’ve really taken some sort of monumental thing to get you to go there. It would also be true, like that ad sponsored by the National Council of Churches, is admittedly, a confessional if you will, a liberal body. They’re not part of what would be many of the churches that are more conservative and probably more supportive of the war for right or wrong but it would represent a particular theological perspective.

In the opposition to the war, I think the peace movement would’ve had some credibility which I don’t think it had, because it never was marching in protest to the slaughter and wickedness going on elsewhere in the world at the time. I mean, how many people were protesting what the Sudanese were doing to the Christians in the south? You know, I don’t see any rallies for that. But as soon as the United States starts doing something about certain things then the peace movement gets all excited about what we’re doing. Well, that’s too late. It loses its moral credibility if it’s silent when there is wrong going on elsewhere and then only speaks when we try to do something.

Religion in the world plays the role of a curb against excessive government. Unless religion and government are combined and then it can become a very volatile and dangerous thing. In the United States, so far, we’ve managed to maintain religious freedom. So you can have comments like these on national television. It may not represent a particular religion, but represents a viewpoint and we have that as a curb against absolute power on part of the government and I think that’s a very healthy thing and I would fight to the death for that.

The thing that struck me about 9/11 and the things that have gone on since is that the terrorists use our freedoms against us. They use the ease of getting in and out of our borders, they use our propensity to educate the world, they use the free flow of money around the world using our institutions -- they rely on our freedoms to get at us. And the difficulty for me philosophically is that if that is true, the defense for it is to curb our freedoms and I don’t like that. But I think that’s the dicey era we’re in right now.

As a superpower we are called to a form of leadership. September 11th was a determining point from which we could’ve made some decisions about how to move forward. And one of the words that comes back to me over and over is integrity. How do we move forward with integrity and provide an example of that? We look to religion for that in some ways but we also look to things like objective standards for just war. What is the information that we have? I think many folks struggle with the fact that there’s limited information and there always has been and there always will be. I mean that is a standard that I think we can continue with. But the world is changing and part of me wants to hope that as it changes we move forward in a way that is a positive leadership rather than a negative one and how we do that with integrity.

My Unitarian minister didn’t say anything about the war. And I was wondering why she wasn’t out on the lines with me. And she said, “I’m not going to speak for the congregation because everyone has to speak for him or herself.” I was very respectful of that position.

This [What would Jesus drive? ad] to me is not evangelical, this to me is misnamed, is a misnomer. That What- would-Jesus-drive organization is not evangelical.

People with genuine faith in Christ, that Christ in his scriptures, his words, influences everything. We don’t compartmentalize our lives. A true Christian is not just a Sunday Christian or whatever you want to say. Certainly we would do that. This is extreme and to put Jesus in there is very disrespectful.

I think religion and faith informs how we live our lives in really, all aspects. At least we hope it does. I think, certainly, how I live in the environment, how I take care of it, how I fail to, it’s extremely relevant.

I see religion as being something that’s supposed to be something genuine, something sincere. Not just for this cause or that cause to be used in a way that furthers something other than goodness and faith. And so for me it’s extremely relevant. But when I saw the ad, I thought to myself, is this being used to further some agenda? Of course there’s some people who believe religion has its own agenda, but for me, if I define faith as trying to bring about good in the world and follow some of these general principles that we have, I think it matters what car I drive, I think it matters whether I recycle, I think it matters how I treat my children, I think it matters how I behave in a number of forms. But again, I find it a little disturbing because I’m not so sure there’s a clear-cut answer in the issue of global warming and if SUV’s affect that.

I think that every human being is religious to the core and this whole idea that somehow we have this little private warm fuzzy religious feeling or something, that’s a very helpful view if you’re trying to suppress religion in the public arena, but everybody is operating out of what motivates them the most. So if you believe that God is going to be found by science or that all of our problems in the world are going to be solved by a better technology, you’re just someone who happens to have deep faith in science or in technology or you happen to believe that there’s just good people everywhere and so your God happens to be demos, the people, and they’ll come with the right solutions if we just get enough votes. Everything will turn out better but everybody is operating out of what they believe is ultimately holding the truth and so culture is essentially the extension of your religion and action, is what comes out of your fingertips, and so it’s deeply religious everywhere you go.

I really feel that regardless of what religion you espouse or what faith, that if you’re thinking logically as a citizen of the earth you’re called upon to be a steward of our resources and our environment. And you talk about evidence. I grew up in Southern California, and I thought I knew everything about smog, and I remember being called in because the smog days were so bad. But yet now, when I go there and visit, I notice the environment has been cleaned up. It’s still bad, but it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be. But when I go abroad and visit Mexico City, where I can’t even breath, it’s 10 times worse than it was in Los Angeles, and I have friends that come back from China and report horrendous clouds of smog there. I’m beginning to wonder what’s this complex of manufacturing and these allegiances for economy are doing to our environment.

I think the [What would Jesus drive?] ad is really silly and it trivializes any religious faith. But with regards to SUV's - I got the book on SUV's for a Christmas present. I haven't read it yet but I read all the reviews around it and I'll get to it once I retire, but the things that I've read so far are very revealing about how the free market economy in the U.S. inverts all of our values.

The design of the [SUV's] grill, for example - it's designed to look ferocious and vicious: "Here I come and you get out of my way." Is that the sort of moral position that we need in the world? Those are deliberate designs to put people in and give them a false sense of security. These are very unsafe vehicles and we claim to be a religious nation and we allow our industries and our businesses - at the conference on religion at Idaho over the week I saw a series of ads using the Adam and Eve story to sell things - subvert our entire moral structure, but we support this. It's totally immoral. That's the reason why SUV's ought to be banned or people ought not to buy them, but I think we've got a sort of value structure here in our country that is expressed in many different ways.

If I go back in our religious tradition, biblically based, one of the key things that I find is “multiply and replenish the earth.” There back in the Old Testament, early on. And I puzzle over “multiply.” That’s not really hard to figure out. Religion has done that pretty well. “Replenish the earth” — I’m not really sure what that meant. To me it means, “think long term.” And I think specifically in our culture we think way short term.

I don’t think we consider beyond our grandkids, maybe beyond our great grandkids. We’re not thinking 15, 20 generations down the line and asking ourselves what happens if we export the way we live to all of the world? Is it appropriate? Do we make their lives better? Do we make their lives more complicated and cheaper by exporting what we export?

If you look at some of the rationale behind Al Qaida, if you believe the rationale they’re giving us, they think that what the U.S. exports is no good. And in large respect, I have to agree with that. I think pornography is no good, I think weapons are no good, I think that the automobile and commercialization in terms of material sense may not be any good. It probably beats some of the other things nations can be doing. But I question in the long run — can you make every country in the world like this? I think the answer is no. The resources aren’t there. So we’re kidding ourselves and we’re giving up our planning for the future to this commercialism we think is so great at the moment.

What’s scary is that we have one of the longest-term fuses of most nations in the world. As short as our attention span is, it is shorter elsewhere. And I would just simply give the example of having worked on USAID projects in Africa, where there’s simply no long-term thinking. And I think this does go back to my concern about the fundamental religious nature of various cultures where there is no planning for the next generation based on economic thoughts, political and social relations, their view of women in men’s roles and so on. But what happens in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where there is no planting of trees for the next generation. I mean you think of Brazil and other places where they’re consuming vast amounts of their resources and they become totally dependent. And I give one example, when there was a power shortage that we had in Kenya and the newspapers would consistently say, what foreign aid agency or country is going to help us with our problem. It was a complete culture of dependence. It was like a drug addict. They didn’t say, what are we going to do to fix this? It was, who’s going to bail us out this time? And it was so steep into the way of thinking that they were almost helpless in terms of being able to organize themselves to solve the problem. And so you would look at some of the townships in South Africa and there were no trees. Nothing green living anywhere. They had cut them all down for fuel. And no one could plant anything because their neighbor would cut it down and burn it too. So when you’re in that kind of environment where it’s just consume, consume, consume and not planning for the children, even your own, you’re in a world of hurt. And I think we don’t look far enough down the road here, but we’re certainly planting trees, we’re trying to look 10, 20, 30, 50 years down the road, to some extent. And I think again, that’s part of a fundamental religious orientation that says we are do care about the future of our children, we aren’t just looking out after number one.

In this topic I have to say I feel a very deep personal responsibility with how I am a consumer or what I’m doing in this economy and this culture and it is directly connected with my faith and how I feel my responsibility as a person of faith. I’m deeply troubled by a whole wide variety of things, from how my clothes are manufactured, how my food is grown and picked, and all of that kind of thing. It troubles me to see people, basically in a situation of oppression to put clothes on my back and my family’s back and to put food on my table. And how do I respond to that. You know, we talked about hopelessness or someone mentioned hopelessness in another discussion. Sometimes I feel a certain sense of hopelessness. How can I possibly have anything to do with this? How can I change something about these poor migrant farm workers and Pasco? Well, I have to say that I feel very strongly that I have to try to minimize my involvement. I garden. I have a dream in my life of somehow not having to buy fruit from a can. I shop at Albertsons. I love Albertsons. I’m very fond of the young man who bags the groceries there. He’s a dear person. I’m glad he has a job. But I would like to step back from that and see how I can step away from that. That’s the only way that I can see that I can be involved in somehow righting things.

I’m here to unite with your hearts. That’s the only thing that matters in the real world. It’s the spiritual education that we need to talk about, and we’re talking about material things. We’re talking about symptoms and we’re ignoring the basic reasons for that. The basic disease is disunity. The beautiful light has sent us many teachers, yet we get focused on one lamp. We remain with that one lamp, never going beyond. And I’m very grateful to be born at this time and to have all these technologies, because God has given us everything in and on earth for men, but yet we have a responsibility for that. So it’s been difficult for me to sit here and listen to political views because I’m asked to shun it; my faith asks me to shun it. But in the same sense I obey the law of the land to the exact letter, no anarchy. My faith has given me back Christianity, which I forsake. Because what the followers of Jesus Christ did to the indigenous people, not only here but all over the world. And our prayers say that if you deny one of these lives, you’ve denied them all. So no longer could I deny Jesus Christ and Christianity. Give it back to me. So we sit here and we know that we have to be stewardesses but what we need to do is we need to have a spiritual education. Light is light, no matter if it comes with Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohamed. It’s still light. The only thing that differs is the social teachings.

We have to be careful about trying to put all this guilt on ourselves, that we don’t give all our money to other countries and that we sacrifice the military and our own welfare to help other countries, especially if it’s not doing any good and it’s helping these corrupt governments to become ever stronger. And I was thinking along the lines of Franklin Graham who has come under such harsh criticism by a lot of religious leaders and others, but the thing of it is, he does what works. And he’s been working; he’s been helping Muslims before it was cool to help Muslims. He goes into poor countries and builds schools and he has this shoebox program where children get all these wonderful boxes of things at Christmas every year, and at the same time he can bring the gospel in an inoffensive way and maybe somebody outwardly, some officials might criticize, but they want him there. So this big worry about Franklin Graham going to Iraq and bringing the gospel and some of these other things . . .

Christians are not all just shoot-from-the-hip, ignorant people. They do excellent work and they are the ones who treat AIDS, people with AIDS, they’re the first. Religious people are the first to do all these dirty jobs. I think we forget what kind of country we live in and what our foundations are, and what made this country great. And instead of criticizing our own country, we should try to export some of the good instead of exporting Hollywood, which I don’t know what you do about that. That’s the thing that’s so hard. But we need to get behind mission organizations. If you are going to give your money, give it to a Christian organization that you know is doing the job.

My son was in the Peace Corps and was in Honduras and they picked up street kids, off the street, and gave them a trade. And I just think if we could export more people in that area, and forget about trying to make them little Christians, because we don’t need to make the Muslims little Christians any more than I want the Muslims coming to me telling me that I need to change because they’ve got a better way. And I just think the attitude that Christians have so often is that we’re just a cut above all these others, it’s just very irritating to me. But another thing I have to say is I think that another problem with our country right now is just plain greed. I think when I see these offshore people who don’t pay taxes, when all of us sitting in this room are paying our little bit of piddle taxes. I think that greed is the biggest sin of all, maybe not the biggest one.

The Dali Lama is a very charismatic person and a lot of people come to him and say: I’m ready to convert to Buddhism, and his answer to them is, stay in your own faith, all the religions have good in them. That takes a lot of courage for a religious leader to say, don’t convert to Buddhism, stay in your own faith. Gandhi flirted with Christianity for a while until he realized that they were meat eaters and smokers and they sinned a lot. He was tempted to convert to Islam just to try to make the peace happen on that subcontinent, but he too stayed in his own tradition, warts and all, because that is where he belonged.

I think as we move towards a world culture we are going to have to really think twice about the traditional mission. When I was in India I was very impressed with the Roman Catholic mission in India. They were building hospitals, and they were building schools and only in the northeast were they baptizing. They had too much respect for their Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist neighbors to go out and knock on the door, because the Hindu usually said, “Oh I believe in Jesus, he’s a reincarnation of Vishnu”. Only in the Northeast where there are no Hindus do the Roman Catholics go through and baptize, but the Pentecostals come in and re-baptize and it really causes a lot of . . . it’s chaotic.

But I think we really need to rethink. The Roman Catholic mission in Asia is an educational and medical mission. They are not converting people to Christianity. I think we’re going to have to start respecting all the religions of the world, because all of the religions of the world have good in them, and they have a good strong moral basis.

And Franklin Graham, I don’t care how much good he does, he shoots from the hip, he says hateful things about Islam, and I think that is not the way a Christian should speak. Jerry Falwell shoots from the hip and does injury to Christianity. Pat Robertson shoots from the hip and does not represent the true spirit of Christ.

The rest of the world, especially the Islamic world, thinks differently--here is the military occupation, basically by the U.S. with its massive force. And then follows Franklin Graham with his missionary zeal. How is this going to be perceived? There are some critical editorials around the country about what Graham is up to . . . and I mean no disprespect to those who are committed to Graham/Robertson type of Christian fundamentalism; I repeat I don't mean any disrespect. But we must broaden our perspectives a bit. How are these zealots likely to be perceived in the rest of the world, especially in that [Islamic] part of the world, with its 1.3 billion people, almost one-fourth of the world population? This is why some insist that we need to be a little more cautious. And perceptions matter--especially when one thinks of the history, the occupation, the crusades, the imperialism, and all that.

But let me add. All religious have enormous good to offer; and one must be most tolerant in this day and age. As some of you perhaps know, Prophet Jesus Christ is very much a part of the Islamic tradition. In fact, his name is mentioned more often in the Islamic scriptures than any other prophet except perhaps Abraham.

Every time I hear discussions where there are all these different perspectives brought in, it is usually Christianity that gets bashed by name by specific people and then what we all want to do is to say is that there’s truth in all the religions out there. I think what you have to recognize is that that kind of advocacy is polytheism, that’s what you’re advocating. And the problem that Christians have with that is that when they look at the scriptures and see Jesus saying “No man comes to the Father but by me,” there’s an exclusivity in the Christian faith that says, not all paths lead to God or to enlightenment or to whatever the current phrase would be. It doesn’t get you there, and is in fact a muddling of things and a confusion of things. Islam in its forms that are being advocated globally is far more exclusivistic and the outcry in the liberal west is, “This is horrible.” They think they know it’s true, but all these polytheists that are jumping up and down saying we have to just look at the little good at everybody are just as imperialistic and damming naming names. It’s like so now you have to say, “Well I believe that all paths lead to god.” Well bull, you don’t have to say that at all. The 1st amendment allows us freedom of religion where you don’t have to knuckle under to the demands for polytheism. So if you don’t like Christianity you don’t have to be a Christian, but it doesn’t mean that every Christian has to somehow say I’ve to be a polytheist now, I have to say that every culture has good in it, everything is just wonderful, sweetness and light, when Christians don’t believe that. And they don’t believe it just cause they’re cranky, it’s because they don’t believe it’s true. And they believe in the revelation of God in the scriptures that say that’s not true, that there is right and wrong, good and bad. Cultures can be corrupt and even wicked. And you even said Franklin Graham is wrong and wicked. According to what standard? You pick your own standard. But the point is you’re going to have your own standard but it doesn’t make Christianity wicked cause it doesn’t believe all of those things.

I don’t know how you can ask religious people, people of faith, people of morality -- and culture gives people morals in the different ways as we all know -- to just assume that their faith or their morality isn’t what counts. And as somebody who is a Christian, I see the way I’m going to experience salvation is through Christianity and the way I live. But that doesn’t mean that I have to impose my religious faith on others, or that that’s even a smart thing to do. And I think you can be a very spiritual person, but be tolerant of others people’s views without embracing the idea that morality or religion or spirituality is relative. So I think that that’s something we really have to be careful with. And I really do believe that Roy hit on something. You know it is so easy to point to somebody who you don’t identify with and you don’t like. And say. well, they’re not doing a good thing. And sometimes I sit back and ask why am I coming to that conclusion? Because we all know historically Protestants have fought with Catholics, Christians have fought with Muslims, and for so long there has been really such intolerance. Whether it comes from the liberal or conservative side, I think we have to be really careful because religion and spiritual warfare or even morality warfare has done a lot of damage to our civilization over the years and if there’s anything we should be learning in this globalized world, I think tolerance is a huge plus and helping others. And we’re in a position as the United States, I think uniquely, to reach out and really make a difference in the world and an enduring one, but I think we’re going to have to do it through tolerance.

When I was a young woman I heard this phrase, “As man may ascend to the roof by means of a rope, a stairway or a ladder, so diverse are the paths by which we reach God.” And we’ve got to have respect for other religions. And that’s what we started on, wasn’t it? That the Muslims feel that the United States wants to destroy the Muslim faith, that seems to be the universal thing among all sects of Muslim religion, is that we are the enemy; we are trying to destroy their faith.

In the New Testament Jesus clearly said, two different times he sent the 12 disciples and then the 70 disciples and he clearly said, at least the way I understand it, “if a community doesn’t welcome you, go somewhere else,” basically. And to me that seems like, if this is a message that clicks with the community you’re welcome there, then do that, otherwise go somewhere else. The apostle Paul also said, somewhere, I can be all things to all people. Which I think speaks to the issue of respect and respecting different people, people’s differences.