“The power of psychedelics is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.”

To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.

Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

What I’m asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.

Most of us are wiser than we may appear to be. On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.

How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.

The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you.

Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.

Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.

As a man believes, so he will act.

We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.

I’m the Ted Bundy of string theory.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.

Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.

Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.

The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.

Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.