“Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.”

There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.

I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.

You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God this that here really are lots of ways of repaying your debt of goodness – by setting to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come.

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them – if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.

YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.

The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

May the perfect grace and eternal love of Christ our Lord be our never-failing protection and help.

Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.

Jesus comes for sinners, for those outcast and those caught up in squalid choices and failed dreams.

We have perfected our weapons but failed to perfect the men who use them.

You will fail. At some point. More than once. Guaranteed. Proceed anyway.

Don’t let failure or disappointment cut you off from God or make you think that the future is hopeless. When God closes one door, He often opens another door – if we seek it.

Our Heavenly Healer often has to hurt us in order to heal us. We sometimes fail to recognize His mighty love in this, yet we are firmly held always in the Everlasting Arms.

Remember that the good angels do what they can to preserve men from sin and obtain God’s honor. But they do not lose courage when men fail.