How Can We Encourage Other Human Beings

Words Like 'god' And 'allah' Must Go The Way Of 'apollo' And 'baal' Or They Will Unmake Our World.

The President Of The United States Has Claimed, On More Than One Occasion, To Be In Dialogue With God. If He Said That He Was Talking To God Through His Hairdryer, This Would Precipitate A National Emergency. I Fail To See How The Addition Of A Hairdryer Makes The Claim More Ridiculous Or Offensive.

Every One Of The World's "great" Religions Utterly Trivializes The Immensity And Beauty Of The Cosmos. Books Like The Bible And The Koran Get Almost Every Significant Fact About Us And Our World Wrong. Every Scientific Domain -- From Cosmology To Psychology To Economics -- Has Superseded And Surpassed The Wisdom Of Scripture. Everything Of Value That People Get From Religion Can Be Had More Honestly, Without Presuming Anything On Insufficient Evidence. The Rest Is Self-deception, Set To Music.

Any Conception Of Human Well-being You Could Plausibly Have, The Taliban Patently Fails To Maximize It.

Religion Provides The Only Story That Is Fundamentally Consoling In The Face Of The Worst Possible Experiences - The Death Of A Parent, For Instance. In Fact, Many Religions Take Away The Problem Entirely, Because Their Adherents Ostensibly Believe That They're Going To Be Reunited With Everyone They Love, And Death Is An Illusion.