Joseph Heller: Quotes about God

“The God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be.”

“No one who ever wants praise will be satisfied with praise, the person who wants love cannot be satisfied with love. No want is ever fulfilled. And therefore I still don't know whether it is better to fear God and keep His commandments or to curse God and die.”

“I hate God and I hate life. And the closer I come to death, the more I hate life.”

“I'm not even sure we really had that much need for God as much as we did seem to have a need to believe in Him.”

“Now THERE'S a hollow state to be in, isn't it — to believe in God and get no sign that He's there.”

“He [God] owes me an apology too- at the very least. I'm not saying I shouldn't have been punished for those sins I committed. I'm saying that the punishments he chose were inhuman. I wonder what favor I'd want. I think I may be afraid to ask for it. I'm afraid He won't grant it. I'm more afraid that He will. Wouldn't it be tragic to find out that He really has been here all this time?”

“If God was dead, how could I feel this bad?”

“God is a murderer, imagine that. I told you I had the best story in the Bible, didn't I? I have always known that He was. Sooner or later He murders us all, doesn't He, and we go back to the dust from which we came. So I'm no longer scared to defy him. All He can do is kill me.”

“God does have this self-serving habit of putting all blame for His own mistakes on other people, doesn't He? He picks someone arbitrarily, unbidden, right out of the blue so to speak, and levies upon them tasks of monumental difficulty for which we don't always measure up in every particular, then charges US for HIS error in selecting imperfectly. He tends to forget that we are no more infallible than He is.”

“I imagine that God Himself frequently wants to feel like a king. Why else would He create the world?”

“Whether God is dead or not hardly matters, for we would use him no differently anyway.”

“She knew Pota had a larger respect for personal privacy than he did for God, Congress, or the U. S. Constitution and never looked at anything there except, occasionally, for the remote control to the television set.”