Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them.

Unreason is now ascendant in the United States in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution ; 68 percent believe in Satan . Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world .

To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place.

About 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity.

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

This is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.

Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.