Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think-though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one-that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

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.

You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.

Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.

I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?'

If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.