Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.

You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.

Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005), they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. . . . Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious.

Death is, in some ways, unacceptable. It's just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die; but I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world. I mean people die and disappear, and we're left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them.

Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.

Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal' or they will unmake our world.