Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily, and fully.

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.

When I sign books, I get lines of people and what they usually say is: "Thank you. You have changed my life." I am really moved by that.

I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind.

There is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation.