With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.

To suggest that the merciful, longsuffering, gracious and loving God of the Bible would invent a dreadful doctrine like Calvinism, which would have us believe it is an act of ‘grace’ to select only certain people for heaven and, by exclusion, others for hell, comes perilously close to blasphemy.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.
But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

I studied every page of this book, and I didn't find enough love to fill a salt shaker. God is not love in the Bible; God is vengeance, from Alpha to Omega.

I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.