I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.
What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.
Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.
In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.
It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.
When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.
We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.
I thought perhaps it should be recognized that religious people, including fundamentalists, are quite intelligent, many of them are highly educated, and they should be treated with complete respect.
Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.
America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.
It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.
Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.
I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.
We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.