We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being - a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse - or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.

Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.