 Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic. |
| The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge. |
| This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet. |
| So many plusses, so many minuses. |
| The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me. |
| I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs. |
| My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston. |
| Some of the parables of the Kingdom made wonderful sense, but the exclusivity in the New Testament put me off. |
| Good things come, and I'm not just referring to riding the buses. |
| I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses. |
| I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much. |
| To change, to convert? Why bother? |
| An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so! |
| In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two. |
| Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity. |
| I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford. |
| I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls. |
| It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism. |
| The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs. |
| Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again. |
