[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

I think that [Paul] Bloom's approach - and others who take it - is not so much that there is a precise genetic basis to faith. But there is a genetic basis to a psychological predisposition that manifests itself as faith and religion under the right conditions.

I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it's such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief's sake. I mean there's only any point in believing something if it's true.

Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Evil…doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to “the Christian majority’s” private liking.

Even if it were true that we need God to be moral, it would of course not make God's existence more likely, merely more desirable (many people cannot tell the difference)