You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

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

The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics.

If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have . . . a recipe for the fall of civilization.

Human experience depends on everything that can influence states of the human brain, ranging from changes in our genome to changes in the global economy.

We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas

[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.