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.

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 me, to be a feminist is to answer the question 'Are women human?' with a yes.

When it comes to ideas - and religions are, among other things, ideas - there is no right not to be offended. ... In fact, if you need laws ... to protect your faith, maybe your faith is weak.

Can currently existing religion be disentangled from the misogyny of its texts, its traditions, and its practices? ... a resounding NO: misogyny not only pervades the major faiths, it's baked in.

A feminist is a person who answers 'yes' to the question 'Are women human?' Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men...It's about justice, fairness, and access to the broad range of human experience.