Atheists should point out that life without God can be meaningful, moral and happy.

I am only me for practical purposes.

One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.

Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.

Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.

The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental.

Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.