Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when ….

Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places..

Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic—that is, he frequently ….

It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liber….

Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life..

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

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..

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….

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….

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….

Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance..

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….

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….

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….

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

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….

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 ….

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….

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