The charcoals of burned out religious philosophies are perceived by devout fanatics as pearls, which the heathen swine cannot appreciate.

Words do not express thoughts very well; every thing immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom of one man seems nonsense to another.

Perhaps not one religion contains all of the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth, and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.

Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies , and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern.

When it comes to metaphysical claims the average man, convinced that his beliefs were formed by Devine Revelation instead of childhood indoctrination, seems much more interested in the comforts of mass delusion than in the possibility of discovering that he might be wrong

Any religion is an illusion to others