When the inner child finds a guardian angel, publishers are in heaven.

The press and the public like certainty and affirmation of popular biases. But real science thrives on the capacity for doubt.

I don't care if religious people consider me amoral because I lack their beliefs in God. I do however care deeply about efforts to turn religious beliefs into law and those efforts benefit greatly from the conviction that individually and collectively we cannot be good without God.

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.

I don't see a direct conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of communities, because I don't perceive of communities as having rights in a way that individuals do. Communities certainly have interests, but they don't exactly have rights.

I do what I do because I have a compulsion to hold forth. I don't spend a lot of time, if any, thinking about the effect my work is going to have on the world. And I have an abiding mistrust of people who think that they're going to change the world. I think that people who think that they're going to change the world are the kind of people who put bombs on airplanes.

There's a way in which all of these grazers at the spirituality buffet are performing a service, because you could argue that grazing leads to a kind of tolerance. People who incorporate teachings from a lot of different traditions into their own belief systems are going to be more tolerant than people who confine themselves within the strict boundaries of one particular religion. Does it contribute to our confusion? I don't know if it contributes to confusion so much as it is evidence of a certain kind of silliness and shallowness.