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

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.

You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.

Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution.