No moral person would do such a thing unless they thought it was divinely warranted.

Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.

Islam is at once the most and the least interesting of the world's monotheisms. It builds upon its primitive Jewish and Christian predecessors, selecting a chunk here and a shard there, and thus if these fall, it partly falls also.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

The thing about religion is that it's the first and the worst. The worst because it's the first.

I vote and I do jury duty.

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.