Overheard

Message to the progressive community: There are more of us secularists, skeptics, atheists and agnostics out here than you think. How about sending a little love our way, for a change?

Columnist Katha Pollitt
"Onward, Secular Soldiers"
The Nation, Sept. 24, 2007

If you run on family values, your values and your family will be subject to scrutiny. Be careful what you wish for: it might get you.

Anna Quindlen
The Last Word
Newsweek, Sept. 3, 2007

. . . as an atheist, I believe that your body is you. That's the first and only fact of human existence.

t Director David Cronenberg
Toronto International Film Festival interview
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Sept. 25, 2007

Those with the power to elect presidents and congressmen--and many who themselves get elected--believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah's Ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the Earth and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in a garden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible God.

This is embarrassing. But add to this comedy of false certainties the fact that 44 percent of Americans are confident that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years, and you will glimpse the terrible liability of this sort of thinking. . .

In a world brimming with increasingly destructive technology, our infatuation with religious myths now poses a tremendous danger.

Sam Harris
"The Case Against Faith"
Newsweek, Nov. 13, 2006