This Is The True Horror Of Religion.

Faith Drives A Wedge Between Ethics And Suffering. Where Certain Actions Cause No Suffering At All, Religious Dogmatists Still Maintain That They Are Evil And Worthy Of Punishment. . . . And Yet, Where Suffering And Death Are Found In Abundance Their Causes Are Often Deemed To Be Good. . . . This Inversion Of Priorities Not Only Victimizes Innocent People And Squanders Scarce Resources; It Completely Falsifies Our Ethics.

I Think It [getting A Gun] Should Be Like Getting A Pilot's License. I Think You Should Require Training To Get A License To Have A Gun.

Religious Faith Obscures Uncertainty Where Uncertainty . . . Exists, Allowing The Unknown, The Implausible, And The . . . False To Achieve Primacy Over The Facts.

The Problem Of Human Suffering Is Never Too Much Rational Thinking, Or Too High A Demand For Evidence. But The Solutions Are. ... Reason Is Nothing Less Than The Guardian Of Love.

We Can Either Have A Twenty-first-century Conversation About Morality And The Human Well-being - A Conversation In Which We Avail Ourselves Of All Scientific Insights And Philosophical Arguments That Have Accumulated In The Last Two Thousand Years Of Human Discourse - Or We Can Confine Ourselves To A First-century Conversation As It Is Preserved In The Bible.