...the idea of a spiritual part of our nature that survives death, the notion of an afterlife, ought to be easy for religions and nations to sell. This is not an issue of which we might anticipate widespread skepticism. People will want to believe it, even if the evidence is meager to nil... compelling testimony ... provides that our personality, character, memory ... resides in the matter of the brain, it is easy not to focus on it, to find ways to evade the weight of the evidence.

The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance.

we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers

The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance , the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light.

I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.