Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way — because it’s had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But you’ve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.

Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think-though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one-that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

As is so often the case with pieces that appear in the 'Onion,' I honestly could not decide whether this was a clever hoax or not - the arguments were almost exactly as stupid as the real thing.

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: "anima"-the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.