The disbeliever

That's highly debatable, though. If you're a Christian and you look at the figure of Jesus, you can easily read his core message as being about love and compassion and caring, particularly for the outcasts of society.

That is Jesus in half his moods speaking that way. But there's another Jesus in there. There's a Jesus who's just paradoxical and difficult to interpret, a Jesus who tells people to hate their parents. And then there is the Jesus -- while he may not be as plausible given how we want to think about Jesus -- but he's there in scripture, coming back amid a host of angels, destined to deal out justice to the sinners of the world. That is the Jesus that fully half of the American electorate is most enamored of at this moment.

Let me follow up on that because a lot of people say the problem is that religion has been hijacked by the extremists -- people who've distorted the basic religious teachings of peace and love. But this, as far as I can tell, is not your view. You say religious moderates are largely responsible for religious conflict.

Well, I think religious moderation is a politically correct discourse about all religions truly being benign in their essence and just being hijacked by people who are psychologically unstable or political megalomaniacs. This is a false view. And it's giving cover to religious extremists. This respect for faith, this taboo against criticizing faith, prevents us from saying the necessary things that we must say against religious fundamentalism.

But wouldn't it make more sense to support the religious moderates, the people who really do not support those fundamentalists? Otherwise, you are removing the middle ground. In essence, if you take away the moderates, you're pitting fundamentalists against secularists. And a lot of people don't buy that dichotomy. I'm thinking of all the people in the U.S. who've rejected the dogmas of the churches they grew up in, but who still believe there is some transcendent reality out there.

It depends on what you mean by transcendent reality. I believe there's a transcendent reality out there, but that belief doesn't give me the slightest inclination to pay lip service to the God of the Bible or to deny the immoral message that comes through in many books of the Bible. I just think it's a myth we finally have to put to rest that our morality is necessarily linked to these scriptural traditions. The Bible is just not a good lens through which to view our present circumstance, given all that we've learned in the last 2,000 years. So questions of stem cell research, questions of social equity are not best processed through a reading of the Bible, however liberal you want to be.

We've been talking about how intolerant so many religious people can be. But aren't you asking us to be very intolerant of religion?

It may sound paradoxical but it's not. I'm advocating a kind of conversational intolerance. It's really the same intolerance we express everywhere in our society when someone claims that Elvis is still alive, or that aliens are abducting ranchers and molesting them. These are beliefs that many people have. But these beliefs systematically exclude them from holding positions of responsibility. The person who's sure that Elvis is still alive and expresses this belief candidly does not wind up in the Oval Office or in our nation's boardrooms. And that's a very good thing. But when the conversation changes to Jesus being born of a virgin or Mohammed flying to heaven on a winged horse, then these beliefs not only do not exclude you from holding power in society; you could not possibly hold power, in a political sense, without endorsing this kind of thinking.

It should be terrifying to us because many of these beliefs are not just quaint and curious, like beliefs in Elvis. These are beliefs about the end of history, about the utility of trying to create a sustainable civilization for ourselves -- specifically, beliefs in eschatology. These are maladaptive. For instance, if a mushroom cloud replaced the city of New York tomorrow morning, something like half the American people would see a silver lining in that cloud because it would presage to them that the end of days are upon us.

I want to step back for a moment and talk about your own background. Did religion play any part in your childhood?

Not really. I had a very secular upbringing. But when I became about 16 or 17, I got very interested in spiritual experience and the possibilities of seeing the world in a fundamentally different sense.

Did you pursue those spiritual interests?

Yeah, I've spent a lot of time studying meditation and sitting on meditation retreats where you're in silence for the entire duration, whether it's one month or three months, just practicing meditation for sometimes 18 hours a day. I've done this mostly in a Buddhist context, but not exclusively. And I've spent a lot of time studying religion and the contemplative traditions within Christianity and Judaism and Islam.

So you don't see Buddhism as being limiting in the same way as the monotheistic religions you've been criticizing?

Well, I certainly see it as limiting insofar as it's a religion. You can make the argument that Buddhism, specifically, is not best thought of as a religion. And certainly many Western Buddhists say that Buddhism is not a religion. But that doesn't change the fact that something like 99 percent of the Buddhists in this world practice Buddhism as a religion in the same superstitious way that most religions are practiced. Now, it doesn't have the same liabilities of Islam or Christianity. You can't get the same kind of death cult brewing in Buddhism, or at least not as readily. And that's why we don't see Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers.

You know, the Tibetans have suffered a terrible occupation under the Chinese. Many people estimate that 1.1 or 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a result of that occupation. We should see Tibetan Buddhists blowing themselves up on Chinese buses, if all religions are equivalent. But we don't see that. What we do see in Tibetan Buddhism -- which is impossible to even imagine in Islam at the moment -- we see Tibetans who have been tortured for decades in Chinese prisons, coming out and saying things like, "My greatest fear while I was in prison was that I would lose the strength of my compassion and come to hate my torturers." Now, that said, there's nothing in Buddhism that's held dogmatically that I would support. It's just that all dogmas are not equal and don't have equal behavioral consequences.

It sounds like you've been meditating for years and often quite seriously. Have you ever felt bliss or rapture while you've meditated?

Oh yeah. The problem with those states, however, is that they are transitory. They are conditioned by concentration. And when your mind is no longer concentrated on your object of meditation -- whether you're focusing on Jesus or a mantra or the state of rapture itself -- when thoughts again intervene and you're no longer concentrated in the same way, the state goes. And one of the real pitfalls of the contemplative life is to crave those states. You can become a kind of drug addict of your own meditative process where you mistake those states as being the goal of meditation.

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