Lionel Blue

To change, to convert? Why bother?

What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst.

Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther.

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

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.

Good things come, and I'm not just referring to riding the buses.

My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.

I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.

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

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

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

During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.

The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs.

I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.

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

I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.

Christianity had two faces which bewildered me - two pictures which didn't fit.

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

This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.

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