The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence…the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.

Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.

Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time.

In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not only on the books as a crime, but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.