I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.

People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error.

Religion is a powerful weapon that can be used because it persuades people to do things. And thus it can be used for good or ill. But it should not be a powerful weapon at all.

That there is a continuous link from humans to gorillas, with the intermediate species merely long dead, is beyond the understanding of speciesists. Tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly leaps to infinite, incomputable value.... Self-styled pro-lifers, and others that indulge in footling debates about exactly when in its development a foetus becomes human, exhibit the same discontinuous mentality. Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.

You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'

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

...it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions.