Values Reduce To Facts About The Well-being

The Same Comparison Holds True Within The United States Itself: Southern And Midwestern States, Characterized By The Highest Levels Of Religious Literalism, Are Especially Plagued By [high Rates Of Homicide, Abortion, Teen Pregnancy, Sexually Transmitted Disease, And Infant Mortality], While The Comparatively Secular States Of The Northeast Conform To European Standards.

This Is The True Horror Of Religion. It Allows Perfectly Decent And Sane People To Believe By The Billions, What Only Lunatics Could Believe On Their Own.

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.

The Idea, Therefore, That Religious Faith Is Somehow A Sacred Human Convention—distinguished, As It Is, Both By The Extravagance Of Its Claims And By The Paucity Of Its Evidence—is Really Too Great A Monstrosity To Be Appreciated In All Its Glory. Religious Faith Represents So Uncompromising A Misuse Of The Power Of Our Minds That It Forms A Kind Of Perverse, Cultural Singularity—a Vanishing Point Beyond Which Rational Discourse Proves Impossible.

Unreason Is Now Ascendant In The United States—in Our Schools, In Our Courts, And In Each Branch Of The Federal Government.