Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

...organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.

Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.

Perhaps the True Self--and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)--will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion.

Religion is best when it points beyond itself, like Isaiah or John the Baptist. It is worst when it gives you just enough of the forms to inoculate you against the substance, when it substitutes rituals for reality, the container for the contents, the wineskins for the ecstatic wine.