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To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham.

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Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you.

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Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

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Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, w...more

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Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because o...more

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The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.

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So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. ...more

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

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Publishers like a good buzz, and negative responses sell books just as well as positive ones.

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The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but bli...more

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The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather tha...more

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Religion enjoys astonishing privileges in our societies, privileges denied to almost any other special interest group one can think of-and certainly d...more

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The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, an...more

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There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility t...more

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The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.