The sources of Islamism's strength include the fact that it is a response to the oppression of the Third World as a whole.

I think the most influential aspect of my work is to show that Judaism and Christianity exist in a continuity with archaic religions.

It doesn't take much insight to realize that wars have been getting worse every time - worse from the point of view of the civilian, more and more destructive, more and more total.

Salvation lies in imitating Christ, in other words, in imitating the 'withdrawal relationship' that links him with his Father... To listen to the Father's silence is to abandon oneself to his withdrawal, to conform to it.

Humanity is the child of religion.

When the Bible and the Gospels say that the victims should have been spared, they do not merely 'take pity' on them. They puncture the illusion of the unanimous victimization that foundational myths use as a crisis-solving and reordering device of human communities.

When we describe human relations, we usually make them better than they are: gentle, peaceful, and so forth, whereas in reality, they are often competitive.

All of my work has been an effort to show that Christianity is superior and not just another mythology.

I am fundamentally an anthropologist and a rationalist. What I say is that human societies are very different from what specialists call 'animal society' because the former have religion.

I believe that in intense conflict, far from becoming sharper, differences melt away.