Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe

We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it.

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.