By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. -this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else.

We have the same genetic code for all living creatures. We have a large number of genes that are manifestly the same, but with detail differences - they look like different drafts of the same book. In extreme cases, like a human and a beetroot, it's like the difference between Matthew and Luke's Gospel - clearly they tell the same story, but with different words. Whereas with a human and a chimp, it's like two different printings of Matthew, with a few typos in one.

Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.

If it suits [God] to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?

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.

Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.

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.