An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.

If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.

Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.

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

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.