There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.

Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.

I think I get from my books what other people get from family or a relationship or from prayer.

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.

Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us: like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God-not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has it's own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.

I remind myself that my pain is not unique. Everybody suffers.

When you feel compassion, you dethrone yourself from the centre of the world.