Lionel Blue

“I recovered my infant Judaism, but in a reformist version.”

“I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.”

“I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.”

“For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.”

“I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.”

“I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.”

“At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.”

“My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.”

“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.”

“It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism.”

“Some of the parables of the Kingdom made wonderful sense, but the exclusivity in the New Testament put me off.”

“This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.”

“It's more fun to watch without joining in.”

“For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.”

“Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.”

“It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.”

“The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.”

“Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.”

“An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!”

“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.”