"What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert."
"We are the only species on this planet that has ever held its own fate in its hands. We have no significant predators, we are the masters of our physical environment. The things that normally cause species to become extinct are no longer any threat to us. The only thing that can destroy us and doom us, are our own decisions. If we're not here in 10,000 years, its going to be because we could not take advantage of a gift given to us by a young Dutch fellow in 1738 [Bernoulli]. Because we have underestimated the odds of our future pains, and underestimated the value of our present pleasures."
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