The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fear….

And I say, the meaning of life is what you make it. There will be as many different meaningful lives as there are people to live them..

Behave in life as at a dinner party. Is anything brought around to you? Put out your hand and take your share with moderation. Does it pass by you? D….

Nothing is truly unnatural, because everything that exists, including human intelligence, is a product of nature. If human intelligence can devise wa….

When I was 14 a chaplain at school gave me a reading list. I read everything and I went back to him with a question: how can you really believe in th….

There is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with r….

Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulne….

I believe that decisions about the timing and manner of death belong to the individual as a human right. I believe it is wrong to withhold medical me….

The wise say that our failure is to form habits: for habit is the mark of a stereotyped world..

Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to u….

Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young..

A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it..

I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head..

Christian churches and Muslim groups have no more right to have their say than women's institutes or trades unions. The government has actively encou….

People should be left to believe what they like, so long as they harm no one else. Apart from normal expectations of politeness, it is not however cl….

Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance..

Nowadays, by contrast, Christianity specialises in soft-focus mood music; its threats of hell, its demand for poverty and chastity, its doctrine that….

To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and ….

Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration..

I do not believe that there are any such things as gods and goddesses, for exactly the same reasons as I do not believe there are fairies, goblins or….

Sensible Catholics have for generations been ignoring the views on contraception held by reactionary old men in the Vatican, but alas, since it is th….