Religion... has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever... If someone votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says 'I must [not] move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'I respect that'... Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.

The next year the radio series became the basis for a BBC television mini-series broadcast in six parts. When he died in 2001 in California he had been trying again to get the movie project started with Disney which had bought the rights in 1998. The screenplay finally got a posthumous re-write by Karey Kirkpatrick and the resulting movie was released in 2005.

". Adams also wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983) Last Chance to See (1990) and three stories for the television series Doctor Who. He was a staunch atheist famously imagining a sentient puddle who wakes up one morning and thinks "This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well must have been made to have me in it!" to demonstrate his view that the fine-tuned Universe argument for God was a fallacy.