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.

Even if we can agree that some things are natural and some are not, what follows from this? The answer is: nothing. There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse).

The border between the natural and the supernatural, religion and philosophy, may not always be clear. But there are lines and we should know and accept which side of it we are on.

Morality is more than possible without God, it is entirely independent of him.

Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of complaint.

If I'm a CEO and I say, 'Misogyny will not be tolerated', that's a more powerful statement than 'It is my sincere hope and our intention to eradicate misogyny from this company'. Sometimes saying things in that more categorical form, has a real function. Although, if you dig beneath it, it is actually one of J.L. Austin's illocutionary acts; you're trying to make something happen rather than describing something already happened. The fact that it has the grammatical form of a description is fine.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.