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

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?

Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.

Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.

What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up.

The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues

Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.