The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.
The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.
Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species – us.
No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.
A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.
The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.
An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today.
We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
Reasons for declaring belief is not are not the same as reasons for believing in god.
In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless.