The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

Food is our common ground, a universal experience.

The thing the Buddhists and the Sufis have in common is a belief that religious certainties are destructive.

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.

Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending - pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.

I have a very deep religious belief.