If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.

Being dead will be no different from being unborn -- I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.

Theology is a non-subject. I'm not saying that professors of theology are non-professors. They do interesting things, like study biblical history, biblical literature. But theology, the study of gods, the study of what gods do, presupposes that gods exist. The only kind of theology that I take account of are those theological arguments that actually argue for the existence of God.

What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?

Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false.

I love romantic poetry.

We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.