God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

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.

When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.

You never came out the way you came in.

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

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.