The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

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?

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world.... Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment.

The atheist proposition is the following - most of the time - it may not be said that there is no god; it may be said that there is no reason to think that there is one.

I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me.

No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.