There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn't matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups.

Atheists sometimes come across as a bit arrogant in this regard, and characterizing faith as something only an idiot would attach themselves to.

I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.

I am persuaded that 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like...eternal hell.

For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But [Charles] Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection.

Saddam Hussein's mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars... In a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data.