It was not that I thought I was smarter. I had simply explored science and found what seemed to me a far more powerful authority. And, I did not steal or murder because I thought they were wrong, not because I feared damnation.

Thought, without the data on which to structure that thought, leads nowhere.

Those who use the Bible as a reference for moral behavior are simply cherry-picking those teachings, such as the Golden Rule, that they have independently decided are moral for other reasons, while ignoring those teachings with which they disagree.

Define self-awareness and tell me what it is about it that requires something more than a material explanation. I do not accept the burden of explaining all phenomena, real or imagined. If you think more than matter is required for this thing you call self-awareness, which you have not defined, then you have the burden of showing why.

In a poll taken in 1998, only 7 percent of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the elite of American scientists, said they believed in a personal god.

The belief in supernatural forces remains to this day a yoke on the neck of humanity, but at least Thales made it possible, for those of us who wish it, to be free of that yoke.

Nature is capable of building complex structures by processes of self-organization; simplicity begets complexity.