Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God. Read Summary
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either. Read Summary
Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy. Read Summary
Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint. Read Summary
There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument. Read Summary
Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be. Read Summary
It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends. Read Summary
I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information. Read Summary
I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? Read Summary
I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way. Read Summary
I'm crepuscular. Read Summary
The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. Read Summary
Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve. Read Summary
Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. Read Summary
The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is. Read Summary
The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal. Read Summary
One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That's how the human species has done as well as it has. Read Summary
The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion. Read Summary
Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting 'O.K.' has deposed the more affirmative 'Yes,' so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of 'like' are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness. Read Summary
I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do. Read Summary