Many Christians who’ve stopped really believing now insist that they revere the Bible as a source of ethical advice. The standard atheist reply is given by Sam Harris: “You and I both know that it would take us five minutes to produce a book that offers a more coherent and compassionate morality than the Bible does.”

The most difficult thing to accept for people who work hard at forming their beliefs on the basis of evidence is that not everyone forms their beliefs in that way. The mistake made by people who form their beliefs on the evidence is thinking that if the person with whom they’re speaking just had a certain piece of evidence then they wouldn’t believ