I've never been a materialist; I've never been somebody who believes in only what we can see and measure. I continue to be a student of religious philosophy, and I continue to take those ideas very seriously.

My understanding of religion and science is that they're both arrogant schools of thought, and whether they acknowledge it or not they continually broadcast the idea that they have the world figured out. And what they don't know, they have a theory for which is probably correct. It feels like that shrinks the world, rather than expands it.

If we're not compelled to gain a deeper understanding of good and evil, how can we make the world a better place? How can we find ourselves at the end of our lives and know that our lives were significant? Those things would be impossibilities.

For something to be completely evil is to be nothing. Satan has good attributes - intelligence, for instance - but they are corrupted. I cannot reconcile myself emotionally to alternative understandings of evil.

There was a time when papal encyclicals were treated as virtual pronouncements of papal infallibility. There are still a small minority of Catholics who cite Pope Paul VI's 1968 document Humanae Vitae - which outlawed artificial birth control - as the word of God.

God will make right all that is wrong, He will take away the lingering effect of sin and what's not right in our lives. He knows how painful life in this world can be.

I'm not a spiritual person, but I really believe in the power of the mind and I really believe in manifesting things.

I don't want to be daft and say I had some spiritual awakening or something, but I really did come of age in Los Angeles, where we recorded the album. I had my own little house and my own little circle and I really got to feel how the city ticks.