Heaven might comprise eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets.

Meanwhile, Smith's Christianity was one we might all enjoy. With God he was on good terms. God is, he wrote, best served by 'regular tenour of good actions ... the luxury of a false religion is to be unhappy'. And, on a trip to Brussels, he noted 'I think, possibly correctly, that Heaven might comprise eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets.'

S. Bayley, 'Taking the short view', SF87 (2025), 25

How long, really, does a God need to watch shit burn before he intervenes?

Don’t tell me God is watching. Cos all my wretched life he’s been watching; how long, really, does a God need to watch shit burn before he intervenes?

N. Bulawayo, Glory (2022), loc 4,056

The cardinal, in his days as master of the realm, had spoken of God as if He were a distant policy adviser from whom he heard quarterly

The cardinal, in his days as master of the realm, had spoken of God as if He were a distant policy adviser from whom he heard quarterly: gnomic in his pronouncements, sometimes forgetful, but worth a retainer on account of his experience. At times he sent Him special requests, which the less well-connected call prayers; and always, until the last months of his life, God fell over Himself to make sure Tom Wolsey had what he wanted. But then he prayed, Make me humble; God said, Sir, your request comes too late. His

H. Mantel, The mirror and the light (2020), loc.4,276

He had crossed out in pencil all the passages in the Book of Common Prayer that praised God

It is strange that the devout should think God can be pleased when they slavishly pay them to him. When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages in the Book of Common Prayer that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it. At the time it seemed to me a curious eccentricity. I think now that my friend showed very good sense.

W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 262

The fact that dutiful, righteous, Jacobites kept on failing to overthrow selfish, evil Whigs was thus an implicit paradox within the mental world of Jacobitism

The fact that dutiful, righteous, Jacobites kept on failing to overthrow selfish, evil Whigs was thus an implicit paradox within the mental world of Jacobitism. If they could not somehow resolve it they were liable to doubt God's blessing upon their cause. And without his blessing their opposition to the status quo in the British Isles was nothing more than an egregious sin.

D. Szechi, 'The long shadow of 1715. The great Jacobite rebellion in Scots Jacobite politics and memory - a preliminary analysis', Royal Stuart Journal 7 (2016), 24

Cease your blasphemy

The death of his father was announced to one of the monks: ‘Cease your blasphemy,’ said he to the person that told him; ‘my father is immortal.’

Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History IV.23.51

the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible

Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval good humouredly about his official religion: about the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak: Christ, an almost too benevolent Land-Steward, son of the Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the porter's lodge, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants: the Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it were, as distinct from the players of the game: the atmosphere of the estate, that of the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday, with, probably, a little cricket for the young men. 

... 

It was probably done with. Along with cricket. There would be no more parades of that sort. Probably they would play some beastly yelping game...Like baseball or Association football...And heaven?...Oh, it would be a revival meeting on a Welsh hillside. Or Chautauqua, wherever that was...And God? A Real Estate Agent, with Marxist views.

F.M. Ford, No more parades (1925) [Parade's End], 394

Forced to choose between one irascible, unpredictable tyrant and another

Laura, on the other hand, had taken to religion in a serious way during Mr. Erskine's tenure: she was still frightened of God, bur forced to choose between one irascible, unpredictable tyrant and another, she'd chosen the one that was bigger, and also farther away.

M. Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2000), 202

God must have heard this sort of thing before

Then the school chaplain offered a prayer, lecturing God on the many unprecedented challenges that face today's young people. God must have heard this sort of thing before, he's probably as bored with it as the rest of us.

M. Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2000), 47