Recently , crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world - burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing people - in protest over twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper. When was the last atheist riot?

Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.

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

Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.

How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.

Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.