And two weeks later, Sunday morning, 9th of January, I found myself standing in front of my congregation -- intelligent, well meaning, mostly thoughtful Christian people -- and I needed to express, on their behalf, our feelings and our questions.
It becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all Iranians -- Muslims and non-Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews living in Iran, people who are devout, not devout.
This is something that Christianity knew very well, which is why in Christian art, as [opposed to] Hollywood, Satan is usually depicted as a gorgeous hunk.
このような刑産複合体は 私たちの国を破産させ 魂を堕落させているので これを危惧した財政保守派と キリスト教保守派が集まり Right on Crime （犯罪に正当さを） という団体を立ち上げました
And so, because the prison-industrial complex is bankrupting our states and corroding our souls, groups of fiscal conservatives and Christian conservatives have come together to form a group called Right on Crime.
Let's go back before Christ, three millennia, to a time when, at least in my head, the journey for justice, the march against inequality and poverty really began.
It has to be one of the multiple ironies of history that a favorite expletive of Muslim fundamentalists is the same one once used by the Christian fundamentalists known as Crusaders: "infidel, " from the Latin for "faithless."
We've allowed Judaism to be claimed by violently messianic West Bank settlers, Christianity by homophobic hypocrites and misogynistic bigots, Islam by suicide bombers.
And we've allowed ourselves to be blinded to the fact that no matter whether they claim to be Christians, Jews or Muslims, militant extremists are none of the above.
I personally met with people from all walks of life -- mayors, NGOs, schoolchildren, politicians, militiamen, people from mosques, churches, the president of the country, even housewives.
They came from a Christian culture, and when they arrived in a new place, they noticed that some people didn't have Christianity, and so they asked themselves the following question: what have they got instead of Christianity?
Now there's a difficulty with proceeding in that way, which is that Christianity is extremely, even on that list, it's an extremely specific tradition.
Now that's a very specific and particular history that Christianity has, and not everywhere is everything that has ever been put on this sort of list like it.
You couldn't give an account of the natural world that didn't say something about its relationship, for example, to the creation story in the Abrahamic tradition, the creation story in the first book of the Torah.
He either was or pretended to be an Orthodox Christian in his metaphysical outlook, and he said it's obvious why the world exists: because God created it.
In 415 CE, the Christian rulers even had a mathematician named Hypatia murdered for studying the library’s ancient Greek texts, which they viewed as blasphemous.
The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology was founded by Evangelical Christians who cooperate with the regime to educate the sons of the North Korean elite, without proselytizing, which is a capital crime there.
And while I found I knew nothing about these faiths at all -- despite my own intensely religious background, I'd seen Judaism only as a kind of prelude to Christianity, and I knew nothing about Islam at all.
He lived in the middle of the Crusades, and others imposed the preoccupations of the time on the Grail, casting it as a powerful relic from the crucifixion.
In medieval European cities, Christian churchyards provided rare, open spaces that accommodated the dead, but also hosted markets, fairs, and other events.
He left St. Peter's Basilica as well as an extraordinary collection of Greco-Roman sculptures -- decidedly un-Christian works that would become the seedbed of the world's first modern museum, the Vatican Museums.
Told in terms of the Christian vision of the Last Judgment, the end of the world, Michelangelo gave you a series of figures who are wearing these strikingly beautiful bodies.
This is the closest we can come to the Bible at the time of the foundation of Christendom under Emperor Constantine, and at the time also of the Council of Nicaea, when the basic creed of Christianity was being agreed upon.
And then the imam made an announcement, thanking and welcoming our guests, because half the congregation were Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, people of faith and no faith, who had come not to attack us, but to stand in solidarity with us.
This doubt compels me to renounce the role of savior that some have placed on me, because our time is too short and our odds are too long to wait for second comings, when the truth is that there will be no miracles here.
But for most of the countries in Africa, it's going to be a lot more dicey: extreme climate conditions, radicalism both from Islam and also Christianity, very poor governance, borders you can't defend, lots of forced migration.
Just a couple months ago, Khalid Jabara, a Lebanese-American Christian, was murdered in Oklahoma by his neighbor -- a man who called him a "filthy Arab."
But my favorite comment came from a seasoned cop who looked at the central figure and said, "You see that guy in the pink?" -- referring to Christ -- he said, "I'd collar him, he's causing all the trouble."
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin suggested that rather than being amoral, The Prince hearkens back to ancient Greek morality, placing the glory of the state above the Christian ideal of individual salvation.
We have one in Kathmandu, Nepal; Dharamsala, India; Takaungu, Kenya -- Takaungu is one-third Christian, one-third Muslim and one-third animist, the community is -- Ollantaytambo, Peru, and Arctic Village, Alaska.
(Laughter) And within a week I had come to believe that the second coming of Christ had occurred, that it was Sun Myung Moon, and that I had been specially chosen and prepared by God to be his disciple.
If you look at the word "salvation" in the Bible -- the Christian usage that we're familiar with -- saving souls, that people go to heaven -- that's actually a latecomer.
As Christian iconography got changed, and swastikas were created out of crucifixes, Batman and Superman were created by Jewish young men in the United States and Canada, also going back to the Bible.
I got accused in a few blogs that I was actually sent by the Pope to preach the Trinity and Catholicism in the Middle East, so you -- (Laughter) you believe who you want. I gave you my version of the story.
For three days, almost all the newspapers of Beirut published all those cartoonists together -- anti-government, pro-government, Christian, Muslim, of course, English-speaking, well, you name it.
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