“There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life.”

“This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed—however obliquely and at a terrible price—by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions—Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God—for us to do this.”

“A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.”

“The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.”

“Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe thatcertain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him.Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each otherover rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything --anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculousthan the world we are living in. ”

“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.”

“False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.”