This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

[Religion] attacks us in our deepest integrity - the core of our self-respect. Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we would not know an evil, wicked act from a decent human act without divine permission, without divine authority or without, even worse, either the fear of a divine punishment or the hope of a divine reward. It strips us of the right to make our own determination, as all humans always have, about what is and what is not a right human action.

The atheist proposition is the following - most of the time - it may not be said that there is no god; it may be said that there is no reason to think that there is one.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.