Tolerance is thin gruel compared to the rapture of absolute truths. It's not surprising that religious people are often better protected by atheists and agnostics than each other.

The magical thinking encouraged by any belief in the supernatural, combined with the vilification of rationality and skepticism, is more conducive to conspiracy theories than it is to productive political debate.

As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought.

What might once have been called whining is now exalted as a process of asserting selfhood; self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression.

Religions, of course, have their own demanding intellectual traditions, as Jesuits and Talmudic scholars might attest.... But, in its less rigorous, popular forms, religion is about as intellectually challenging as the average self-help book. (Like personal development literature, mass market books about spirituality and religion celebrate emotionalism and denigrate reason. They elevate the "truths" of myths and parables over empiricism.) In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. Faith is not a function of stupidity but a frequent cause of it.

I don't spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don't consider that a relevant question. It's unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can't worry about.

There is this fashionable progressive notion that everything is so completely political that the idea we could have some sort of neutral legal process is practically utopian - because we all know that the more money you have, the more rights you can exercise in this society. But I don't think that you deal with income inequality by limiting the First Amendment rights of affluent people. I'd rather see people screw around with the tax code to redistribute wealth a little bit than screw around with the First Amendment.