The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.

"True" resembles... a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so.

If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

I illustrate with a quotation from the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who died recently and is, I suspect, now having a lengthy conversation with his maker. Rorty argued that secular professors ought “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.