Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them - if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.

An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.

If the concept of consciousness were to fall to science, what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will? If conscious experience were reduced somehow to mere matter in motion, what would happen to our appreciation of love and pain and dreams and joy? If conscious human beings were just animated material objects, how could anything we do to them be right or wrong?

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.