Accepting that the world is full of uncertainty and ambiguity does not and should not stop people from being pretty sure about a lot of things.
Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.
It's not leftovers that are wasteful, but those who either don't know what to do with them or can't be bothered.
From time to time, it is worth wandering around the fuzzy border regions of what you do, if only to remind yourself that no human activity is an island.
Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.
The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers.
Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process.
Seek first what is true and of value, and then whatever happiness follows will be of the appropriate quantity and, more importantly, quality.
The mark of a mature, psychologically healthy mind is indeed the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only as much as there really is. Uncertainty is no virtue when the facts are clear, and ambiguity is mere obfuscation when more precise terms are applicable.
The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.
True respect means taking other people's beliefs seriously and assuming they are adult and intelligent enough to be able to cope with it if you tell them, clearly and civility, why you think they are totally, utterly and disastrously wrong.
I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.
Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone 'just doing my job' or the infernal self-checkout machine.
If you believe you are right, then you should believe that you can make the case that you're right. This requires you to deal with serious objections properly.
One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.
Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.
No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science.
Believers are right when they say that to understand a religion properly you need to get under its skin. But to understand it fully, you cannot stay there: you have to take a more objective view, too.
There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!
On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.
