“Christmas is the Disneyfication of Christianity.”

“Those who first acquired language and tried to think the human situation were utterly overwhelmed. They could cope only by imagining that there were greater invisible beings who could and did understand and control both the human psyche and the world. ‘I can’t make sense of it, but I have to believe that there is a larger perspective within which it all makes sense.”

“Nothing out there tells us how we must live: we and we alone can now with confidence knowingly trust our own hearts, and admit that we do and must invent our own ethics.”

“I am suggesting that we can and do regain eternity when we are so immersed in life, in moral action, or in aesthetic contemplation, that we completely forget about time and anxiety.”

“For it was only via the idea of God that we were able to develop all our ideas about a unified self, reason, a unified law-governed cosmos, sovereignty, property, supervision (Providence) and management, long-term purposes and action to attain them and so on. God taught us everything, so that we are eternally grateful to God even as we now leave him behind.”

“Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs.”

“To love is to be vulnerable: if God loves, then God is mortal.”