I should emphasize this, to keep well-meaning but misguided multiculturalists at bay: the theoretical entities in which these tribal people frankly believe — the gods and other spirits — don't exist. These people are mistaken, and you know it as well as I do. It is possible for highly intelligent people to have a very useful but mistaken theory, and we don't have to pretend otherwise in order to show respect for these people and their ways.

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.

The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.

Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to "hasten the inevitable," not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion.

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died