“It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts. There must be delirious pride in the feeling that you are bringing the full weight of your ideas to bear on mankind. But for that you must have something to say.” [...]

“On your left you have a God who is all-knowning and omnipotent, and on your right you have a book that contains more errors than a Lindsay Lohan post-it. The left, being omniscient, omnipotent and living outside time, has no ability to change his mind; the right, being from human origin, contains more changes of opinion, mind and action than a Diana Ross show contains dress changes.”

“The knowledge exists by which universal happines can be secured; the chief obstacle to its utilisation for that purpose is the teaching of religion. Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific co-operation in place [...]

“If the God hypothesis is a promising one, then we don’t need to appeal to faith. If the God hypothesis doesn’t sit well with the evidence we have, then we should reject it and it would be wrong to seek to cling to it by giving it some privileged exemption from criticism. [...]“

For many believers, my opposition to religion is unacceptable, strange and meaningless, but somehow theists do find a little bit of respect for it — not in the sense that they also believe it, or that they even find it a possibility or fact, but in the sense that they can (somewhat) respect my opinion [...]

When one appreciates a painting, poem, cinematic piece of art or any other piece of art, like a novel or an opera song, what is it that strikes you as true perfection in it? Not every art object will be perfect in its fullness, but bits of it — a chapter in a novella, a [...]