“It broke my heart. But remember I was a believer. Though I understood the power of the Scriptures they were quoting from, and I did believe in the healing powers of faith, I was seeing it debased and demeaned. But unlike a lot of the people I understood the language. What’s always bothered me about the fundamentalists is that they seem preoccupied with the most obvious sins. If those sins, sexual immorality and drug addiction, come out of unhappiness, then I’m sure God wants to set people free of that unhappiness. But I couldn’t figure out why the same people were never questioning the deeper, slyer problems human spirit like self-righteousness, judgmentalism, institutional greed, corporate greed. You only have to look at unfair trade agreements that keep the developing world in the Dark Age to see the hypocrisy of what I’m talking about. These people talk about the debasing of culture. What about the debasing of hundreds of thousands of real lives?”

Bono, “Bono on Bono: Conversations with Michka Assayas”, p 187