it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists

If you think all this is going on, all these gigantic fields of gravity and light with you in mind, then you really do have a self-centredness problem.

The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the “war” against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

Though it is true we are the highest and smartest animals, ospreys have eyes we have calculated to be sixty times more powerful and sophisticated than our own and that blindness, often caused by microscopic parasites that are themselves miracles of ingenuity, is one of the oldest and most tragic disorders known to man. And why award the superior eye (or in the case of cat or bat, also the ear) to the inferior species.

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.

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