I'm a Spinozist. I believe in reason. I think all the progress that we've made making this a better world have been because of reason and not religion. I think religion has been pulled along by reason and that's why we read The Bible now so differently, even believers.

The philosophers talk across the centuries exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed from any influences derived from non-philosophical discourse.

Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and I wouldn't say so much it's informed my views, but it's informed my interest, so I think as a child I was often very baffled by knowledge claims.

Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.

Are there experts, ethical experts, that's very offensive to all of us? Because it's part of our humanity to have a stake in these questions to feel that we ourselves know the difference between right and wrong. And then along come these experts, philosophers, claiming, you know, an expertise, a special training, a special skill, a special talent.

In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.