... you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

The Universe does not owe us meaning.

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.

Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes.

Leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods express a preference for "natural" methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.