When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted--anything!--the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women--or anyone--as chattel or inferior beings.

For many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking.

I'm anticlerical, not antireligion. If somebody believes there is God, I'm not interested in trying to persuade that person there is no intelligent design to the universe. Where I become interested and wake up is about the temporal power of religion, things like prayer in schools, or Catholic-secular hospital mergers.

Whether you look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, wherever a distinction of sex is made, it is to the advantage of men. If you think of religions as if they were novels, the authors are men, and so are the major characters.

For me, religion is serious business - a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.

We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie.

If you run into trouble doing what's expected, people sympathize with you, while if you try something else and flop everyone says, You see?