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.

Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

If I could do just one thing, it would be to dissociate faith from virtue, now and for good, and to expose it for what it is, a servile weakness, a refuge in cowardice, and a willingness to follow, with credulity, people who are in the highest degree unscrupulous.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen