Evil…doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to “the Christian majority’s” private liking.
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.
Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?
More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.
Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.
most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.
My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that is to say, Joe and I were going.
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.
There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one's mind.
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps, old snuff-boxes, or even to paintings and statues.
Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.
In most women's lives, everything, even the greatest sorrow, comes down to a question of 'I haven't got a thing to wear'.
Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.
It is then he realises that certain things loom larger than forgiveness and reconciliation: memory, for one, and history, bloody history.
