“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.”

“how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience,”

“If you have a belief and you come against an experience which the belief says is not possible, or, the experience is such that you have to drop the belief, what are you going to choose — the belief or the experience? The tendency of the mind is to choose the belief, to forget about the experience. That’s how you have been missing many opportunities when God has knocked at your door.”

“The image of God is your final obstruction to a religious experience.”

“Don't gape at me, Logan, everyone sees the way you look at her, how you watch over her like a hawk. You're too protective of her. Combine that with your competitive nature, add a dash of lust and a pinch of anger, and you have a perfect recipe for trouble.”

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