Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. - Sam Harris

I've read the books. God is not a moderate. There's no place in the books where God says, "You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books."

Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble. It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs."

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.