You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps.

Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of 'spirituality' or 'mysticism' to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem - because millions of people have had experiences for which 'spiritual' and 'mystical' seem the only terms available.

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

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

We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.

It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.

God is great"). Conversations about the practical impossibility of God's existence and the science-based irrationality of an afterlife slid seamlessly into xenophobia over Muslim immigration or the practice of veiling. The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason. "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.