Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.

Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?

If you divide Christians into denominations, agnostics and atheists come in third, behind Catholics and Baptists. That's interesting when you contrast it with the lack of influence of nonbelievers.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.

What Francis [Collins] was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues. It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he'd save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day.