Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals.
Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.
I’m not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.
I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.
Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil.
By dislaiming the idea of a next life, we can take more excitement in this one!
Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don’t see you jumping out of buildings.
I think what I’d really like to see would be a mass consciousness-raising movement so that we would all become vegetarian.
It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.
There’s no point of having faith if you have evidence.
Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that’s also the definition of delusion.
Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.
All animals are minor variations on a very particular theme.
Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.
The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.
The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children.
Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion.