This evening I wish to suggest that we Christians should accompany people on their pilgrimages. Specifically we should travel with people as they search for the good, the true and the beautiful.

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

This evening I wish to suggest that we Christians should accompany people on their pilgrimages. Specifically we should travel with people as they search for the good the true and the beautiful.

People should have freedom in their pilgrimages and tours. They should come and visit historical monuments and sites - let's say the sites around Iran - where they can easily engage in wide- scale contacts with others.