About Lionel Blue: Lionel Blue is a British Reform rabbi, journalist and broadcaster. He was the first British rabbi publicly to declare his homosexuality.
My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.
To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.
I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.
What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst.
Jews are just like everyone else, only more so.
The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs.
At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.
Christianity had two faces which bewildered me - two pictures which didn't fit.
Some of the parables of the Kingdom made wonderful sense, but the exclusivity in the New Testament put me off.
It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism.
I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much.
Old friends die on you, and they're irreplaceable. You become dependent.
I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.
An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!
Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther.
This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.
I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.
I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.
Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic.
I recovered my infant Judaism, but in a reformist version.
