It's not that it's difficult to keep one's faith in times of war- after
all, war is man-made and the suffering it brings is also man made.

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As a Jew, there is no doubt. I am not even sure I understand what being
saved means, but I certainly know what doing good works means, and doing
good works, carrying out God's wishes on this earth, is why we are here
in the first place.

The world will only be a better place when we all realize
that actions to improve life for everyone else are what matters, and are
less concerned with our personal well being, or even, dare I say it, our
personal salvation.

Questioning one's faith is absolutely essential.

There is a growth- very unattractive and worrying-in a religious position across the faiths that wants to forget the Enlightenment ever happened, and does not believe we should think for ourselves, use our God-given intelligence to work out, question and generally use the evidence from scientific research, to think for ourselves how to interpret the traditional religious views of how we came to be where we are, and what we know about human life and death.

A creative modern approach to religion requires of us to question, discuss, ask, answer, and listen to others. It also requires us to use the knowledge that exists everywhere around the world in all fields of human endeavor both to question our faith and to strengthen it, for only by questioning and testing one's faith can one be sure it is robust and worth defending.

There is now no absolute moral position. It was clear, in my view, that we
should not have gone into Iraq. We did so on the understanding that there
were 'weapons of mass destruction'.

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