Joseph Heller Quotes

...the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any.

I find myself by default an atheist but fairly unhappily so. It would be bloody marvelous if there was a god.

I sang the hymns, and I read the Bible stories, but I was always perplexed, like, 'Really? Jesus wants you for a sunbeam? For a what?'

It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.

I no longer believe that the Bible is the literal and infallible word of God. And I don't believe in God as a figure in the sky listening to your prayers, things like that.

To me, these biblical stories are just so many fish stories, and I'm not specifically referring to Jonah and the whale. I need indisputable proof of anything I'm asked to believe.

He has done things that caused me to doubt His wisdom, but never His existence.

It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality?

Plenty of church members are shaky about what they believe, while not many are shaken by what they believe.

Were he supreme, were he mighty, were he just, were he good, this God you tell me about, would it be through enigmas and buffooneries he would wish to teach me to serve and know him?

When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks... But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.

Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.

It is hard for many people to give up the religion in which they were born; to admit that their fathers were utterly mistaken, and that the sacred records of their country are but collections of myths and fables.

They are either people of faith who have lost their faith from reading my books, or they are people who had already lost their faith, and something about my books encouraged them to affirm that.

Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.

The story of the creation and similar things in it did not impress me very much, but on the contrary made me incline somewhat towards atheism.

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e. the Book of Revelations), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams.

Surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of prayer.

God does not believe in our God.

In every generation there are voices that question the authority of Scripture. So in one sense this is merely part of the continuing stream. But there's a sense in which the questions that are raised against Scripture vary a wee bit from generation to generation.

God is love? Not bloody likely.

No men deserve the title of infidels so little as those to whom it has been usually applied; let any of those who renounce Christianity, write fairly down in a book all the absurdities that they believe instead of it, and they will find that it requires more faith to reject Christianity than to embrace it.

An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths.

My religious faith remains in possession of the field only after prolonged civil war with my naturally skeptical mind.

I was about 21 when I read that [Mere Christianity], and my faith was really being shaken during those days. Its a great, classic book.