I really dislike land acknowledgments because they’re purely performative. They are there to make the issuer look progressive and moral, but they acc… - Jerry Coyne

Although this book deals with the conflict between religion and science, I see this as only one battle in a wider war—a war between rationality and superstition. Religion is but a single brand of superstition (others include beliefs in astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing), but it is the most widespread and harmful form of superstition. And science is but one form of rationality (philosophy and mathematics are others), but it is a highly developed form, and the only one capable of describing and understanding reality.

He is a dissimulator, a back-pedaler, a coward, and a self-serving ignoramus. In other words, he’s a politician.

For good people to do evil doesn’t require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of its key elements: belief without evidence—in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but in any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent.