The misfortunes which God is represented in the book of Job as allowing Satan to inflict on Job, merely to test his faith, are indications, if not of positive malevolence, at least of a suspicious and ruthless insecurity, which is characteristic more of a tyrant than of a wholly powerful and benevolent deity.

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.

The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge...Unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself.