To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.

Skepticism is not a position; it's a process.

So, of course, Gish's presentation was well received, which it would have been the case had he only gotten up and said "praise the Lord" and sat back down.

The question itself [of UFOs] I think is legitimate. It's interesting, it's fascinating. It's mythic in scale and one of the grand questions. It's like the God question or, you know, the meaning-of-life question. It's one of those, on that scale. So you'd have to be made of wood not to be interested and, you know, have they come here? Are they up there?

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.

As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations.