Brian Martin > Brian's Quotes

“Something else I learnt...is respect for reality as against all the many alternatives to it--conventional assumptions, fashionable ways of looking at things, ideologies, social or personal aspirations, fears, intentions, wishful thinking, religious claims, and the rest...”
― Bryan Magee

“Even after I lost my religious faith, Christianity remained to me deeply and resonantly interesting, and I have long believed that anyone who does not find Christianity interesting has only his or her unfamiliarity with the topic to blame.”
― Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

“What Christianity promises, I do not understand. What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine, not even when I was a Christian.”
― Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

“Scribes working throughout Christianity’s first five centuries were troubled by the New Testament’s discrepancies...In time, a process called harmonization emerged within Christian thought, which involves taking contradictory passages from different gospels and explaining away the differences by creative imagining.”
― Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve