"The personages of the Christian heaven and their conversations are no more matter of fact than the personages of the Greek Olympus and their conversations."
“Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.”
New York Times: As an only child, did you find one of your parents easier to talk to than the other?
Christopher Buckley: My mother. She got it. He often didn’t get it.
NYT: What didn’t he get?
CB: Religion.
NYT: He was a practicing Catholic. What are you?
CB: I am post-Catholic.
NYT: As opposed to a lapsed Catholic?
CB: I am probably more of a collapsed Catholic.
NYT: Do you believe in the afterlife?
CB: Alas, no.
“I have a particular faith, I describe myself as a Jewish atheist. I’m Jewish by birth origin and it’s part of who I am. I don’t believe in God, but I think faith is a really important thing for a lot of people."
"My religion is doubt. I believe with all my heart that I will never know everything, that the decisions I make will necessarily be flawed by the imperfect assumptions I base them on but that the only way to keep learning is to change those assumptions when faced with new evidence."
“I could see the fear in his eyes when he was smiling. I went to see the preacher, the guy who’d baptized me. I begged him to come and visit Daddy, just to talk to him, you know? Give him a blessing or something. But he never did. He never came. God, I hated him. Cold-ass bastards like that ought to — I don’t know — they should be in some other racket, I know that. I had no time for religion after that. I never prayed. I never said another prayer. Not like I meant it anyway.”