FRANK SCHAEFFER

Our elites, including me, have opted out of their responsibilities when it comes to defense.

We are not evolved but evolving.

We’re living in an acquisitive capitalist society that is fundamentally anti-family and fundamentally uncomfortable with just enjoying being human. We’d rather shop than live, acquire than love and stare into a screen than hold each other.

My problem with all forms of fundamentalism is that the position is fixed. This is like talking about a fixed position as seen from a moving jet: it's disappearing over the horizon with or without your permission.

When I was a child, my parents taught a literal creation. By the time I was in my 20s they were accommodating evolution. In other words, less creed, more roll with changing ways of seeing. Maybe adapting is a better way to see this.

We are always in transition.

All we know about Jesus is what someone else wrote down... so really one should say, "Here is what someone wrote down that they said Jesus said..." this isn't uncertainty on purpose, just plain speaking.

Beliefs should be like the rest of life, and real life isn't rules but learning and adaption.

You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. Now you have the nerve to criticize the 'architect' America just hired - President Obama - to rebuild from the ashes.

There were three kinds of evangelical leaders: The dumb or idealistic ones who really believed. The out-and-out charlatans. And the smart ones who still believed – sort of – but knew that the evangelical world was sh*t, but who couldn't figure out any way to earn as good a living anywhere else.

Laws of nature don't know they are "fixed." That's a human pattern seeking description that comes out of our need to survive. It isn't an objective description of anything.

Donald Trump is not a very bright or nice man. Bad combination.

We don't just change our minds, we change the way we see things. That's one reason I'm a better grandfather than I was a father.

The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward — there-is-no-global-warming — rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled.

Positions on politics and religion are labels. Inside I'm still me, just older and tired.

Scientists and theologians can’t offer better than circular arguments, because there are no other kinds of arguments. Bible believers quote the Bible, and scientists quote other scientists. How do either scientists or theologians answer this question about the accuracy of their conclusions: “In reference to what?

I do think evangelicals have been under attack.

Since science is fashionable today, it allows its fraternity to propose cloddish monstrosities as a solution to man's problems in many fields. Fashion rules and, anyway, who but the experts can even dare to speak up?

Science "says" nothing. People say things and knowledge changes.

The way even movements change is stunning: Chinese communist capitalists? Evangelicals deciding to be nice to gay people?

People are not as one-dimensional as the stories about them.

There is nothing more profane than the image of an atheist with tears in his eyes conducting the glory and passion of Handel's Messiah.

I think that the Democratic Party has been ill served by identity politics. I think that ironically evangelicals have now bought into the same mistake. They have discovered allies in the white supremacist movement. I think this is a heavy price to pay and will in the end accelerate the departure from religion by young people.

We have no outside point of view. We are nature too.

North Korea and evangelical empires have the same principle of leadership: nepotism to the nth degree. You may not get the call, but you inherit the mailing list.