Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.

I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.

It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.

It doesn't have to be the Grand Canyon, it could be a city street, it could be the face of another human being - Everything is full of wonder.

...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.

Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance.

Perhaps worse still is what liberal societies might do to themselves in the face of this new and different threat [of terrorism]. They begin, by small but dangerous increments, to cease to be as liberal as they once were. They begin to restrict their own hard-won rights and freedoms as a protection against the crminial minority who attempt (and as we thus see, by forcing liberty to commit suidcide, succed in doing) to terrorise society.