A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.

The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.

Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens - ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come.

People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.