Religions Have Depended On The Relative Isolation

Has It Ever Occurred To You How Lucky You Are To Be Alive? More Than 99 Percent Of All The Creatures That Have Ever Lived Have Died Without Progeny, But Not A Single One Of Your Ancestors Falls Into That Group! ... Not A Single One Of Your Ancestors, All The Way Back To The Bacteria, Succumbed To Predation Before Reproducing, Or Lost Out In The Competition For A Mate.

Is He A Dread Genetic Determinist, Or A Dread Environmental Determinist? He Is Neither, Of Course, For Both These Species Of Bogeyman Are As Mythical As Werewolves. By Increasing The Information We Have About The Various Causes Of The Constraints That Limit Our Current Opportunities, He Has Increased Our Powers To Avoid What We Want To Avoid, Prevent What We Want To Prevent. Knowledge Of The Roles Of Our Genes, And The Genes Of The Other Species Around Us, Is Not The Enemy Of Human Freedom, But One Of Its Best Friends.

The Kindly God Who Lovingly Fashioned Each And Every One Of Us And Sprinkled The Sky With Shining Stars For Our Delight - That God Is, Like Santa Claus, A Myth Of Childhood, Not Anything [that] A Sane, Undeluded Adult Could Literally Believe In. That God Must Either Be Turned Into A Symbol For Something Less Concrete Or Abandoned Altogether.

I Don't Think There Is Any Religious Revival. I Think What We Are Hearing, The Furor, Is Merely The Hysterical Response Of The Churches The Handwriting On The Wall That They Are Seeing.

If The Concept Of Consciousness Were To Fall To Science, What Would Happen To Our Sense Of Moral Agency And Free Will? If Conscious Experience Were Reduced Somehow To Mere Matter In Motion, What Would Happen To Our Appreciation Of Love And Pain And Dreams And Joy? If Conscious Human Beings Were Just Animated Material Objects, How Could Anything We Do To Them Be Right Or Wrong?