Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. Mindless may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion.

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

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment-thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too?

The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion.

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.

Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.