The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

There is great variation in brain power all the way from Einstien on one hand to Sarah Palin on the other.

However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place?

Ideally, I'd like everybody to be secular.

I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.

I think Douglas [Adams] is writing with an eye to irony for adults at the same time as entertaining children.

I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.