Richard F Holloway 1933-

"A wonderful thing was liberated into the ether at the Protestant Reformation- a challenge to power, this ability to draw a line in the sand and say we're just not prepared to take this any more. I miss the prophetic element in religion. It's always in competition with the priestly element and the kingly element, and they dominate the church at the moment"

The former Bishop of Edinburgh, the Rt Revd Richard Holloway. Twelve years ago he resigned as Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, when an infuriated group of his Evangelical clergy declared the diocese vacant.

He does not pray or say the office, but he walks the hills everyday, and "I intercede for people. I remember them in my mind lovingly, with intention, and offer them the gift of my loving support". Religion, he says, is not a lie but a mistake: the mistake is thinking it is any more than a human construct. The mistake is "sacralising" texts, which means that you cannot move your value system; the mistake is always having to ask permission. Religions start out as "vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive prescriptive rights to them.

"I would like a lighter approach to these wonderful texts, so that they don't stymie us when we confront an obvious evil. It took us 1800 years to get rid of slavery, which is scripturally mandated. We should be more like the Quakers, who revere scripture, but don't need scripture's permission to do the right thing."

"Religion can sometimes be a good mistake- our glory, as well as our shame, it's poetic language keeping us on our metaphysical toes for the possibility of otherness. Perhaps it is the one human institution that consistently reminds us of our brokenness and need for redemption. But religion is always better when weak, not  strong."

"When it is in power, it is atrocious. Look at what's happening over the gay-marriage thing, the echoes of the impatience of the Church. How dare the Government not pay attention to us, how dare you disagree with us?- we own the definition of marriage."