Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths.

From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.

We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.

About 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity.

The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.

There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does.

It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.