Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.

Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.

It would be really worrying if, as a Darwinian, it was impossible to think of ways in which our behavior could be explained.

Religion is nothing more than a useless and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful.

By dislaiming the idea of a next life, we can take more excitement in this one!

Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith can get distorted as positions are hardened.

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.