Everyone in Iran is perceived to be a child with a paternal authority vested in the Guardian Council and the Sufi elders. They're supposed to be grateful. They can never for a moment not be afforded this wonderful protection. The father who will never go away. The father who will never quit caring for them.

I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.

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

The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

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.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.