I don't deny that religion is very healthful to a lot of people. And as long as they don't try to convert me, I have, you know, nothing - and to interfere with the rights of people to believe other religions or to not believe in any religion at all - as long as they mind their own religion - perfectly all right with me...

We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.

If during the Reformation you were a Catholic who lived in a part of Germany in which Lutheranism was the ascendant religion and the ruler of the province or the region was Lutheran, to stay a Catholic, you either had to be a dissenter or you had to leave.

A person can be religious and still respect secular values and not talk about Jesus all the time as though every American believed in Jesus.

The Roman Empire was fairly tolerant of religious choice as long as you made a point not of thumbing your nose in public at the Roman gods.

It is hard to think of conversion as a blinding light on the road to Damascus, or as a highly spiritual or intellectual process, when the light comes from a flickering television; the voice of the deity is Bishop Sheen and you have drilled your father on his catechism answers...I was troubled at a young age by the idea that pouring water over someone's head could change both his relationship to God.

I no more believe in the God of the Jews than I believe in any God.