"Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church"

"The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum"

"I have an almost religious zeal... not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up"

"I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult"

"The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament"

"Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile"

"An intellectual is going to have doubts, for example, about a fundamentalist religious doctrine that admits no doubt, about an imposed political system that allows no doubt, about a perfect aesthetic that has no room for doubt"

"I have a friend who lives in the South Side of Chicago. I helped out at a church charity there where they try to give a bit of cohesion to a desperate area. Everyone was very welcoming"

"There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being"

"My own personal, moral, spiritual, religious, etc. beliefs don't oppose same-gender marriage"

"The history of the Church of Rome is a constant leakage of members into such breakaway cults, which go on splitting"