The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward — there-is-no-global-warming — rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled.

Beliefs should be like the rest of life, and real life isn't rules but learning and adaption.

We are always in transition.

There is nothing more profane than the image of an atheist with tears in his eyes conducting the glory and passion of Handel's Messiah.

I'm less certain now but kinder.

The secular humanist, although he would never dream of committing the social faux pas of calling a black man a negro, feels perfectly free to castigate Christians and their leaders in any way he likes.

We don't just change our minds, we change the way we see things. That's one reason I'm a better grandfather than I was a father.