“Religious beliefs are sometimes based not on testimony by others but on religious experiences of the believer.”

“Take a pinch of belief in God, add a dash of desire to experience God, stir in emotion to taste, and you have a recipe for religious experience.”

“Religious experiences also occur only when emotions run high and only to those who were predisposed to believe.”

“To overlook extra possibilities is the fallacy of false dichotomy.”

“God’s commands are arbitrary if He has no reason to command one act rather than another; but, if He does have reasons for His commands, then His reasons rather than His commands are whatmake acts immoral.”

“One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis the sublime book par excellence. Experiences and aspirations of which intimations may be found in Plato, Nietzsche, and Spinoza have found their most evocative expression in some sacred books. Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.”

“And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.”