One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy 'legacy' is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and "torch-passing" rhetoric in general.

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

For some reason, which I believe I can guess, the churches/mosques want control of people when or while they are the most vulnerable or suggestible. If they can't get them in school, then they get them when they are hungry, or frightened, or ill, or homeless, or unemployed. Same difference. Here's your gruel, and here's a tract.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

I am a person of faith: I am a person who will believe practically anything on no evidence at all.

It is a pity that...the majority of feminists and their allies have stuck to the dead ground of "Me Decade" possessive individualism, an ideology that has more in common than it admits with the prehistoric right, which it claims to oppose but has in fact encouraged.

Here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerate people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.