When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.
Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.
I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.
You can legally lie about the real world to your heart's content, but until some human being is materially damaged, nobody will complain.
I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.
What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?
I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'
If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural.
If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That's just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated.
The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place.
Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won't do debates with Young Earth creationists.
I wouldn't want to have the thought police going to people's homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don't want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that.
In Britain, you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that.
I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.
The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren't that interested in whether Jesus was real.
It makes me furious to hear haters of all skin colors - especially Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists - deride other people because of their different beliefs and lifestyles.
I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.
Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.
To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.
I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.
