A great liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many fellow-travelers of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them regressive leftists; they are in fact reverse racists. They have...
The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.
A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
You’re not from around here, are you? asked the room service girl.No, I replied. That’s why I’m staying at a hotel . . .
While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death.
What constitutes a civil society? At minimum, it is a place where ideas, of all kinds, can be criticized without the risk of physical violence. If you live in a land where certain things cannot be sai...
We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.
We might also wonder, in passing, which is more moral: helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think the creator of the universe will reward you for it?
We live in a world of unimaginable surprises - from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light’s dancing for eons upon the earth - and yet paradis...
To agree to keep a secret is to assume a burden
This is not (as you have charged) to paint religion with a broad brush. I am very quick to distinguish gradations of bad ideas; some clearly have no consequences at all (or at least not yet); some put...
The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religiou...
The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained—as the beliefs, ritua...
The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there...
The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.
The fact that millions of people use the term morality as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their ter...
The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured.
The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathetical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledge a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a propo...
Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life e...