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

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That's how the human species has done as well as it has.

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

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.

Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.