Beer with breakfast...

It's a familiar start to a nomad's day: emailing a magazine article while I enjoy a Wetherspoons breakfast. People around me are ordering pints of beer with their breakfast, while the barmaid refrains from asking "Is that wise?"

Some quotes by skeptics and atheists are played for laughs; that doesn’t necessarily make then any less perceptive…

“Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that no one has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside” (George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman).

“It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it” (G K Chesterton). Islam fails the test, I think.

“The proper response to religious folly is not outrage but amused contempt” (S T Joshi, in the Introduction to H L Mencken’s book, On Religion).

“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions” (Thomas Jefferson).

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled” (Mark Twain).

“Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure” (George Carlin).

“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart” (H L Mencken)…