All I'm arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there's no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty-and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I'm telling you I arrived at it irrationally.

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable).

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

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that.

We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.

The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.