I don't say things like "the grace of God." All that's white noise to me, not because I'm an intellectual. For many people, it's gibberish. Likewise, the idea that the Koran was dictated by an archaic illiterate is a fantasy.

I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.

Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.

As is so often the case with pieces that appear in the 'Onion,' I honestly could not decide whether this was a clever hoax or not - the arguments were almost exactly as stupid as the real thing.

I'm dying, but so are you

It [defending Salmon Rushdie] was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.