Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

In one was, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely this reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: 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.

I think the cultural task is to separate our impulses and needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.