Foreskin's Lament Quotes

“This is the term we’ve been using lately: theological abuse. It involves adults, known or unknown to the underage victim, telling them a Lunatic runs the world, that He’s spying on them, that He’s waiting for them to break a rule.”
― Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament

“my mother put me in the box and made it very clear that her love was conditional upon my remaining in the box.”
― Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament

“Yes, maybe I would write a book someday. I had always possessed a certain facility with words; when I was very young, my brother teased me so badly that one day I threw a knife at him.

—No, said my mother.—Use your words.

I did. I told him how selfish he was, how he was tearing our family apart with his stubborn belligerence, how he was becoming everything he hated in our father and worse.

—Okay, said my mother,—don't use your words.”
― Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament

“I believe in a personal God; everything I do, He takes personally.”
― Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament

“Then again, isn’t tradition just another word for that particularly religious, self-righteous, non-thinking inertia that propels so many to extremes they might not ever have engaged in had they stopped to actually consider, to weigh, to examine?”
― Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament

“It occurred to me that maybe it wasn't so much that my father on Earth was like my Father in Heaven, but that my Father in Heaven was like my father on Earth. That maybe if God gave you a test that He thought you could pass, He got really pissed off if you failed—not because you failed, but because He didn't like being wrong. And maybe when God got pissed off, He made his way downstairs to Earth, kicked in the door to your world, and threatened to break your goddamn arms. Or your goddamn heart. Or whatever else he could get His goddamn hands on.”
― Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament

“The people who raised me will say that I am not religious. They are mistaken. What I am not is observant. But I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumbfounded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each one more hateful and bloodthirsty than the next, as I'm doing my best to lose Him. I'm failing miserably.”
― Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament

“L’uomo fa progetti e Dio ride. Che cazzo di stupido aforisma è? Vuol dire che Lui è uno stronzo? Che fine ha fatto L’uomo fa progetti e Dio fa del Suo meglio perché questi progetti si realizzino? In quale religione c’è un’espressione del genere?”
― Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament

“My rabbis taught me that it was wrong to say God caused the Holocaust; that he simply, in 1938, turned His head. He looked away.”
― Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament

“Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father.”
― Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament