Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs.

A belief is made religious, not so much by its content, as rather by the way it is held.

All life is dying life – including the life of God.

To say that God is love is in effect to say simply that love is God.

To love is to be vulnerable: if God loves, then God is mortal.

We should be empty of clutching, empty of self, empty of all the old ideas of substance. We should be ‘lost in the objectivity of world-love’, as I have elsewhere put it; or, perhaps better, we should let ourselves be only an empty space filled with brightness. Life lived like that is ‘eternal’ life.

Christmas is the Disneyfication of Christianity.