If I were God, I'd work on the reach of empathy.

I was raised Catholic. Not just a little bit Catholic, like my wife, Catherine. When she was young, many Catholics in France already barely went to church, except for the big three: baptism, marriage, and funeral. And only the middle one was by choice.

Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.

We would much rather blame nature for what we don't like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like.

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.

I'm personally a nonbeliever, so I'm struggling with if we really need religion.

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.