PZ has a lot to say. I present some gems below for your education.
I’m sure that I have some irrational beliefs of my own. I have no idea what they are. It’s not holding irrational beliefs that makes you an idiot. It’s holding the irrational beliefs and demanding that those be imposed on everyone else.
Nobody has convinced me that God exists. That’s not going to happen.
Science is the answer. I’m sorry; you may be a very devout religious person, but praying is not going to solve the world’s problems. It never has. We’re living in an enlightenment, which is fuelled by rational thinking and science. Science is the answer.
I’m buddies with a lot of the big shot new atheists, people like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett. There’s nothing we’re saying that Betrand Russell didn’t say. This is all the same old stuff. The only difference is that we’ve got the primal scream therapy of atheism. New atheists are the people who shout and yell a lot about this stuff. But it’s the same old stuff that atheists have been talking about for years and years.
Atheists tend to be politically liberal, fairly tolerant. The tolerance part is that there’s no question that nobody is going to deport creationists. Nobody is going to shut down the churches. Nobody is going to do anything like that. What we want to do is put things in a proper perspective. If you want to believe that in the privacy of your home, if you want to get together in church and talk to people about this, yes, that’s perfectly reasonable. That’s the tolerance we’ll give them.
There are some of the people in the intelligent design movement who are incredibly nasty, awful, and misrepresent science in ways that I cannot forgive. This is not about demonizing the individuals.
I have to single out this man, whom I consider the most contemptable, despicable, cruel, and vicious evil liar in the creationist movement today, yes, he’s a nasty, nasty person. (PZ has never met or talked with this ID proponent.)