I have never quite understood - and this is no doubt my failing - I never quite understood why you would read fiction to understand the human condition.

It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.

I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives.

Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.

It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem.