To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.

This is how you play tennis without the net

What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.

Indeed, what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it. It is in such cases that the true genius lurking behind many of our laws stands revealed. The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.

I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.

It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed (Aquinas).