Delany

“What I have a problem with is not so much religion or god, but faith. When you say you believe something in your heart and therefore you can act on it, you have completely justified the 9/11 bombers. You have justified Charlie Manson. If it's true for you, why isn't it true for them? Why are you different? If you say "I believe there's an all-powerful force of love in the universe that connects us all, and I have no evidence of that but I believe it in my heart," then it's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that Sharon Tate deserves to die. It's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that you need to fly planes into buildings for Allah.”
― Penn Jillette

“The true cause of hatred and violence is faith versus faith, an outward expression of the ancient instinct of tribalism.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence

“The reason that 'guru' is such a popular word is because 'charlatan' is so hard to spell.”
― William J. Bernstein, The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between

“The advances of science and technology will bring us to the greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham: how much to retrofit the human genotype. Shall it be a lot, a little bit, or none at all? The choice will be forced on us because our species has begun to cross what is the most important yet still least examined threshold in the technoscientific era. We are about to abandon natural selection, the process that created us, in order to direct our own evolution by volitional selection—the process of redesigning our biology and human nature as we wish them to be.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence