By dislaiming the idea of a next life, we can take more excitement in this one!

The fear of Hell is a very powerful motivation.

It is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.

Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world.

My computer is a very complex gadget and it was designed by many designers, so why must the universe have only a single designer and not many designers?

I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.

Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you.

All religious beliefs seem weird to those not brought up in them.

Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

From a Darwinian perspective, it is clear what pain is doing. It's a warning: 'Don't do that again.' If you burn yourself, you're never going to pick up a live coal again.

Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.

Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.

If I'd been born in ancient Greece, I'd worship Zeus and Aphrodite.

It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world.

Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins.

A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.