John Updike Quotes

I'm a lapsed Catholic in the best sense of the word.

I went to Catholic school in and out. I'm what you call a recovering Catholic. I have many major issues with the church.

Thy Ballocks have no Semen, Thine Udders have no Milk; Ever thou seekest Bliss With Hard-ons swoln with Piss; Thy Gods are Bunk and Bilk

Religion was no cure for dysfunction.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

A large psychic void is left by a loss of faith. So many Catholics have tried so many things to replace it.

Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

I was raised Catholic, and then I kind of wandered away somewhere in high-school. I never got confirmed, which is a big deal.

I was brought up Roman Catholic. I'm not even baptized.

In spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no love for God.

Young people all over the world are very frustrated. They are very disillusioned. Many of them are turning their backs on religion. They are walking away from the faith of their parents, and most of this is because religion has failed them.

It seems true that the growth of science and secularism made organized Christianity feel under threat.

Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.

I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

A deist is someone who has not lived long enough to be an atheist.

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

I went to church as a boy, and then I quite quickly stepped away from religion. But I remained fascinated by the need people have for religion.

Gandhi said it; Frederick Douglass said it. A lot of people have probably said 'It's not Christ that I have a problem with, it's his people.' And that was my struggle: it's God's people. I felt disenfranchisement. I felt so much abuse from organized religion because I'm walking in a direction that a lot of them couldn't fathom and can't understand.

My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would've hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.

What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.

Religion is always falling apart.

I am surprised you shd. say fancy and aesthetic tastes have led me to my present state of mind: these wd. be better satisfied in the Church of England, for bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism.

I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.

These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.