I'm not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well. And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over.

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

Religion fosters servility and solipsism.

Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.