As I argued in Beloved Son, a book about my son Brian and the subject of religious communes and cults, one result of proper early instruction in the methods of rational thought will be to make sudden mindless conversions- to anything- less likely. Brian now realizes this and has, after eleven years, left the sect he was associated with. The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy- and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational- the powers of reason are suprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind.

God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon ignorance and h…

Asthma doesn't seem to bother me any more unless I'm around cigars or dogs. The thing that would bother me most would be a dog smoking a cigar.

No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible.

The mass of people who are Bible-taught never get free from the erroneous impressions stamped on their minds in their infancy, so that their manhood or womanho…

I want to examine that dangerous thing that's common to Judaism and Christianity as well: the process of non-thinking called faith.

'The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought.'