The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.

Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.

The crucial distinction between systems...was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state.

It's considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don't see why that's considered a normal thing.

Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!

If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species.