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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.
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On the way to work good-hearted young girls sometimes offer me their seats, which I accept and bless them in return, a transaction satisfying to all concerned.
Lionel Blue
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I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.
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I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.
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It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism.
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Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic.
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Good things come, and I'm not just referring to riding the buses.
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For a devotee or lover, the being, worshipped or loved, will always be the only one for her or him.
Lionel Blue
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For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.
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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.
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So many plusses, so many minuses.
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I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.
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For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.
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I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.
Lionel Blue
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At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.
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The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.
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Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.
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During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.
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The real evidence for Jesus and Christianity is in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practicing Christians.
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Some of the parables of the Kingdom made wonderful sense, but the exclusivity in the New Testament put me off.
Lionel Blue
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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.
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To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.
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Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther.
Lionel Blue