If we’re not keenly aware of the choices we’re making, we’re not likely to work for better ones. - John Allen Paulos

The fashion pages have always puzzled me. In my smugly ignorant view, the articles appear to be so full of fluff and nonsense as to make the astrology columns seem insightful by comparison.

Claiming that a holy book’s claims are undeniable because the book itself claims them to be is convincing only to the convinced.

The connections among morality, prudence, and religion are complicated and beyond my concerns here. I would like to counter, however, the claim regularly made by religious people that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral or law-abiding than they. There is absolutely no evidence for this, and I suspect whatever average distance there is along the nebulous dimension of morality has the opposite algebraic sign.