How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Monkey was the basis of much thought with us. On the sideboard, on the Turkestan runner, with their eyes, ears, and mouth covered, we had see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil, a lower trinity of the house. The advantage of lesser gods is that you can take their names any way you like. (1.24)
Augie is Jewish, but neither Judaism nor any other formal religion plays much of a role in his life. We wonder if he could commit to a faith if he tried. By the way, he's referring here to the image of the three monkeys: Hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil—you might recognize them as these three emojis.
Quote #2
But although she never went to the synagogue, ate bread on Passover, sent Mama to the pork butcher where meat was cheaper, loved canned lobster and other forbidden food, she was not an atheist and free-thinker. (1.28)
Religion for Grandma Lausch is more of a general moral code than an obligatory set of beliefs and practices. It ties in with her desire to see the March boys become gentlemen. It's a religion of respectability rather than piety. Aretha would be proud.
Quote #3
What had made him an atheist was the massacre of Jews in his town. From the cellar where he was hidden he saw a laborer pissing on the body of his wife's dead brother, just killed. "So don't talk to me about God," he said. But it was he that talked about God, all the time. (1.28)
Augie doesn't delve much into his own religious beliefs, if he has any. The idea of God doesn't seem to mean all that much to him. If anything, it's an academic concept, but one that fascinates him, if only for the ironies. Augie is amused by the atheist who talks obsessively about God.
Quote #4
Grandma, all the same, burned a candle on the anniversary of Mr. Lausch's death, threw a lump of dough on the coals when she was baking, as a kind of offering, had incantations over baby teeth and stunts against the evil eye. It was kitchen religion and had nothing to do with the giant God of the Creation who turned back the waters and exploded Gomorrah, but it was on the side of religion at that. (1.29)
Augie associates Grandma Lausch's practices with religion because of their ritualistic nature. They're not just habits or personal quirks, but repeated behaviors that have become little meaningful traditions.
Quote #5
"Everyone has bitterness in his chosen thing. Bitterness in his chosen thing. That's what Christ as for, that even God had to have bitterness if he was really going to be man's God, a god who was human." (12.148)
This is Kayo, who lives between Augie and Mimi in the student house, waxing poetic on Mimi's choice to have an abortion. Neither Augie nor Mimi hold him in high regard. This tangent into Christian symbolism might have been interesting to Augie in other circumstances, but when his mind is on Mimi and her very personal and private affairs, he's not exactly in the mood to listen.
Quote #6
You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good. (13.4)
This task of humanizing and familiarizing a strange world may be the closest thing Augie has to a religious impulse. He wants control over his life, so he can make it into something special. This life is all he expects. When he's dead, he'll be dead, and that will be it.
Quote #7
Even a man who wants to believe, you sometimes note kidding his way to Jesus. (13.164)
This touches on the question of authenticity, which would become a major theme in existentialist philosophy. There's a difference between wanting to believe and believing. See, for example, Mulder and Scully. Those outfits make us want to believe.
Quote #8
Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on their being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent. (17.111)
From an atheist perspective, religion is a fabrication. Do you think Augie sees it this way? Augie has his own illusions—or hopes that he's willing to concede could be illusions. He might not believe strongly in God, but he believes in a better future. He talks and acts as though life owes him distinction and somehow and at sometime he will find it.
Quote #9
"Or take the Gospels. How are you supposed to put them to use? Why, they're not utilizable!"
Augie is something of a pragmatist. We find it interesting, however, that Augie has his own "not utilizable" interests. He reads a lot, for example.
Quote #10
He was felling very grand, the place inspired him, and he sat down and gave me a sort of talk—pretty amazing!—about Paris and how nothing like it existed, the capital of the hope that Man could be free without the help of gods, clear of mind, civilized, wise, pleasant, and all of that. (26.55)
Notice that Augie, while describing the lesson from Frazer, capitalizes "Man" while keeping "gods" in the lower case. This highlights how Frazer sees humanity as above the divine. His is a philosophy that goes back at least as far as the French Revolution. No surprise that he conveys this idea to Augie while they are both in Paris.