Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.

To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.

What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.

Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: 'Don't be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones. People might suppose this was in poor taste.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing