It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.

Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.

Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.

Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.