“A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution” — Thomas Jefferson

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. — Mark Twain

In Unweaving The Rainbow I tried to convey how lucky we are to be alive, given that the vast majority of people who could potentially be thrown up by the combinatorial lottery of DNA will in fact never be born. For those of us lucky enough to be here, I pictured the relative brevity of life as a laser-thin spotlight creeping along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything before or after the spotlight is shrouded in the darkness of the dead past, or the darkness of the unknown future. We are staggeringly lucky to find ourselves in the spotlight. Howver brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull and barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who never be offered life in the first place? — Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion