The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.

We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticise it.

I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.

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

If it suits [God] to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?

Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought.

Theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Issac should not be taken as literal fact. And the appropriate response is twofold: first, many, many people even to this day, do take the whole of their Scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Second, if not of literal fact, how should we take the story? As an alagory? Then an alagory for what? Surely, nothing praiseworthy. As a moral lesson? But what kind of morals could one derive from this appalling story?