The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.

The mind is the effect, not the cause.

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.

It's a no win situation. It's a mug's game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity.

The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.