Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.

Accepting that the world is full of uncertainty and ambiguity does not and should not stop people from being pretty sure about a lot of things.

Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That's why economics is not the dismal science, it's no science at all.

Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.

Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator.

In my experience, those who make the biggest fuss about not spending much at Christmas are generally the ones who buy what they want and eat where they want 12 months a year.

A lot of religious belief - even the majority - involves making factual claims about the world which do come into conflict with science and history. For Christians, a test of this is the Empty Tomb. I ask Christians: 'are you saying that it does not matter - as a matter of fact - whether or not Christ's tomb was empty and that he was resurrected?' At that point, I find that, to a lot of them, it really does matter, despite all the fine talk about not wanting to confuse science and history with religion.