Nothing optional -- from homosexuality to adultery -- is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.

In order to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a heartbeat, switch off a developing brain.

Exceptional claims, require exceptional evidence.

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.

There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.

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