Here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerate people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.

The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.

No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation - is that good for the world?

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled.