The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense.

More than half of Americans have changed religions at least once in their adult lifetime. This is - the rate of religious conversion here is much, much higher than it is anywhere in Europe, for example.

I think very few people realize how much the separation of church and state has to do with the fact that Americans are not only more religious than a lot of other people in the world but that conversions are much more common here.

My atheism doesn't define my day-to-day life at all. But I realize - and maybe it is because, unlike people who sort of stay comfortably in a religion, I had to do a lot of thinking and reading before I realized that I was an atheist.

I have received many touching letters and emails from people who live in the most religious parts of the country, in places like rural Texas, saying it is so good to see someone be able to say I am an atheist without shame.