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I Think The Important Thing To Learn Is That We Can Retain A Sentimental Loyalty To The Cultural And Literary Traditions Of, Say, Judaism, Anglicanism Or Islam, And Even Participate In Religious Rituals Such As Marriages And Funerals, Without Buying Into The Supernatural Beliefs That Historically Went Along With Those Traditions. We Can Give Up Belief In God While Not Losing Touch With A Treasured Heritage.

-Richard Dawkins

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I Think The Important

Richard Dawkins

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I Think The Important Thing To Learn Is That We Can Retain A Sentimental Loyalty To The Cultural And Literary Traditions Of, Say, Judaism, Anglicanism Or Islam, And Even Participate In Religious Rituals Such As Marriages And Funerals, Without Buying Into The Supernatural Beliefs That Historically Went Along With Those Traditions. We Can Give Up Belief In God While Not Losing Touch With A Treasured Heritage.

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It Is Universally Accepted That An Admission Of Atheism Would Be Instant Political Suicide For Any (u.s.) Presidential Candidate.

A God Capable Of Continuously Monitoring And Controlling The Individual Status Of Every Particle In The Universe Cannot Be Simple. His Existence Is Going To Need A Mammoth Explanation In Its Own Right.

Religion Is The Most Inflammatory Enemy-labelling Device In History.

There's A Natural Tendency For Children To, In Some Sense, Inherit The Cultural Values Of Their Parents. I'm Not Against That, That's Fine, That's Wonderful. What I Am Against Is Labelling. Nobody Ever Labels A Child A Cricketer Because His Father Is A Cricketer, But They Do Label A Child A Catholic Because His Parents Are Catholic. I Think It's More Or Less Unique. Nobody Ever Labels A Child A Socialist Or A Conservative Or A Liberal Because That's What Their Parents Are.

Charles Darwin Made Arguably The Greatest Discovery Any Human Has Ever Made. He Was A Man Of Great Persistence. He Wasn't Probably A Natural Genius, He Worked Very Hard - Even Though He Was An Invalid. He Was A Great Family Man, A Very Nice Man. I Think He Was Admirable In All Sorts Of Ways.

Maybe Scientists Are Fundamentalist When It Comes To Defining In Some Abstract Way What Is Meant By 'truth'. But So Is Everybody Else. I Am No More Fundamentalist When I Say Evolution Is True Than When I Say It Is True That New Zealand Is In The Southern Hemisphere. We Believe In Evolution Because The Evidence Supports It, And We Would Abandon It Overnight If New Evidence Arose To Disprove It.

Even If Not A Single Fossil Has Ever Been Found, The Evidence From Surviving Animals Would Still Overwhelmingly Force The Conclusion That Darwin Was Right.

We Have To Find Our Own Purposes In Life, Which Are Not Derived Directly From Our Scientific History.

Purpose Of Life

There Is Enough Information Capacity In A Single Human Cell To Store The Encyclopedia Britannica, All 30 Volumes Of It, Three Or Four Times Over.

Encyclopedia Britannica

We Have Sexual Lust Even Though We Know Perfectly Well That, Because We're Using Contraception, It Is Not Going To Result In The Propagation Of Our Genes. That Doesn't Matter, Because The Lust Was Built Into Our Brains At A Time When There Was No Contraception.

All Life Evolves By The Differential Survival Of Replicating Entities.

The Meme For Blind Faith Secures Its Own Perpetuation By The Simple Unconscious Expedient Of Discouraging Rational Inquiry.

Design Can Never Be An Ultimate Explanation For Anything. It Can Only Be A Proximate Explanation. A Plane Or A Car Is Explained By A Designer But That's Because The Designer Himself, The Engineer, Is Explained By Natural Selection.

Even If There Were No Actual Evidence In Favor Of The Darwinian Theory, We Should Still Be Justified In Preferring It Over All Rival Theories.

Real Life Seeks The Gentle Slopes At The Back Of Mount Improbable, While Creationists Are Blind To All But The Daunting Precipice At The Front.

Indeed, Organizing Atheists Has Been Compared To Herding Cats, Because They Tend To Think Independently And Will Not Conform To Authority.

It Is Absolutely Safe To Say That If You Meet Somebody Who Claims Not To Believe In Evolution, That Person Is Ignorant, Stupid Or Insane (or Wicked, But I'd Rather Not Consider That).

Faith Is The Great Cop-out, The Great Excuse To Evade The Need To Think.

Again, It Is Belief Without Evidence. In The Case Of Stalinism, People Actually Distorted Science, Because It Was For The Good Of The Communist Party.

An Atheist Before Darwin Could Have Said, Following Hume: I Have No Explanation For Complex Biological Design. All I Know Is That God Isn't A Good Explanation, So We Must Wait And Hope That Somebody Comes Up With A Better One. I Can't Help Feeling That Such A Position, Though Logically Sound, Would Have Left One Feeling Pretty Unsatisfied, And That Although Atheism Might Have Been Logically Tenable Before Darwin, Darwin Made It Possible To Be An Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist.

I Once Wrote That Anybody Who Believes The World Is Only 6,000 Years Old Is Either Ignorant, Stupid, Insane Or Wicked.

The Idea That God Could Only Forgive Our Sins By Having His Son Tortured To Death As A Scapegoat Is Surely, From An Objective Point Of View, A Deeply Unpleasant Idea. If God Wanted To Forgive Us Our Sins, Why Didn't He Just Forgive Them? Why Did He Have To Have His Son Tortured?

After Sleeping Through A Hundred Million Centuries We Have Finally Opened Our Eyes On A Sumptuous Planet, Sparkling With Color, Bountiful With Life. Within Decades We Must Close Our Eyes Again. Isn’t It A Noble, An Enlightened Way Of Spending Our Brief Time In The Sun, To Work At Understanding The Universe And How We Have Come To Wake Up In It? This Is How I Answer When I Am Asked—as I Am Surprisingly Often—why I Bother To Get Up In The Mornings.

You Believe That All Humanity Came From Adam And Eve, And Humans Have Not Evolved At All Since. So Tell Me; Between The Two Of Them, Which Was Black, Which Was White, And Which Was Asian?

The Take-home Message Is That We Should Blame Religion Itself, Not Religious Extremism - As Though That Were Some Kind Of Terrible Perversion Of Real, Decent Religion. Voltaire Got It Right Long Ago: 'those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities.' So Did Bertrand Russell: 'many People Would Sooner Die Than Think. In Fact They Do.

We Accept That People Are Irrational For Good Darwinian Reasons. But I Don't Think We Should Be So Pessimistic As To Think That Therefore We're Forever Condemned To Be Irrational.

I Was Brought Up In A Family Which Valued Natural History. Both My Parents Knew The Names Of All The British Wildflowers, So As We Went Walking The Country, I Was Constantly Being Exposed To A Natural History Sort Of Knowledge.

More Poignant For Us, At Laetoli In Tanzania Are The Companionable Footprints Of Three Real Hominids, Probably Australopithecus Afarensis, Walking Together 3.6 Million Years Ago In What Was Then Fresh Volcanic Ash. Who Does Not Wonder What These Individuals Were To Each Other, Whether They Held Hands Or Even Talked, And What Forgotten Errand They Shared In A Pliocene Dawn?

Be Warned That If You Wish, As I Do, To Build A Society In Which Individuals Cooperate Generously And Unselfishly Towards A Common Good, You Can Expect Little Help From Biological Nature. Let Us Try To Teach Generosity And Altruism, Because We Are Born Selfish.

Religion Is Nothing More Than A Useless And Sometimes Dangerous, Evolutionary Accident. Religious Behavior May Be A Misfiring, An Unfortunate Byproduct Of An Underlying Psychological Propensity Which In Other Circumstances Is, Or Once Was, Useful.

Do Not Indoctrinate Your Children. Teach Them How To Think For Themselves, How To Evaluate Evidence, And How To Disagree With You.

I Don't Think God Is An Explanation At All. It's Simply Redescribing The Problem.

I'm Easily Persuaded That A Really Good Novelist Who Gets Inside Somebody Else's Head Could Be Serving A Valuable Purpose. I Enjoy Satirical Novels That Take A Wry, Humorous, Ironic Look At Modern Life.

The Whole Point Of Religious Faith, Its Strength And Chief Glory, Is That It Does Not Depend On Rational Justification. The Rest Of Us Are Expected To Defend Our Prejudices. But Ask A Religious Person To Justify Their Faith And You Infringe 'religious Liberty'.

Theologians Will Protest That The Story Of Abraham Sacrificing Issac Should Not Be Taken As Literal Fact. And The Appropriate Response Is Twofold: First, Many, Many People Even To This Day, Do Take The Whole Of Their Scripture To Be Literal Fact, And They Have A Great Deal Of Political Power Over The Rest Of Us, Especially In The United States And In The Islamic World. Second, If Not Of Literal Fact, How Should We Take The Story? As An Alagory? Then An Alagory For What? Surely, Nothing Praiseworthy. As A Moral Lesson? But What Kind Of Morals Could One Derive From This Appalling Story?

I Am Utterly Fed Up With The Respect We Have Been Brainwashed Into Bestowing Upon Religion.

Be Thankful That You Have A Life, And Forsake Your Vain And Presumptuous Desire For A Second One.

Evolution Is A Fact, As Securely Established As Any In Science, And He Who Denies It Betrays Woeful Ignorance And Lack Of Education, Which Likely Extends To Other Fields As Well.

You Contain A Trillion Copies Of A Large, Textual Document Written In A Highly Accurate, Digital Code, Each Copy As Voluminous As A Substantial Book. I'm Talking, Of Course, Of The Dna In Your Cells.

It Is Possible In Medicine, Even When You Intend To Do Good, To Do Harm Instead. That Is Why Science Thrives On Actively Encouraging Criticism Rather Than Stifling It.

My Mind Is Open To The Most Wonderful Range Of Future Possibilities, Which I Cannot Even Dream About.

We Are Going To Die, And That Makes Us The Lucky Ones. Most People Are Never Going To Die Because They Are Never Going To Be Born. The Potential People Who Could Have Been Here In My Place But Who Will In Fact Never See The Light Of Day Outnumber The Sand Grains Of Sahara.

I Would, Like Any Other Scientist, Willingly Change My Mind If The Evidence Led Me To Do So. So I Care About What's True, I Care About Evidence, I Care About Evidence As The Reason For Knowing What Is True. It Is True That I Come Across Rather Passionate Sometimes - And That's Because I Am Passionate About The Truth... I Do Get Very Impatient With Humbug, With Cant, With Fakery, With Charlatans.

I Believe That An Orderly Universe, One Indifferent To Human Preoccupations, In Which Everything Has An Explanation Even If We Still Have A Long Way To Go Before We Find It, Is A More Beautiful, More Wonderful Place Than A Universe Tricked Out With Capricious Ad Hoc Magic.

Atheism Is Not A Religion. Abstinence Is Not A Sex Position.

Suffering Is A Byproduct Of Evolution By Natural Selection, An Inevitable Consequence That May Worry Us In Our More Sympathetic Moments But Cannot Be Expected To Worry A Tiger - Even If A Tiger Can Be Said To Worry About Anything At All - And Certainly Cannot Be Expected To Worry Its Genes.

I Am Not Advocating A Morality Based On Evolution.

I Personally Would Consider It To Be An Honour To Be Fossilized.

A Designer God Cannot Be Used To Explain Organized Complexity Because Any God Capable Of Designing Anything Would Have To Be Complex Enough To Demand The Same Kind Of Explanation In His Own Right.

If There Is Something That Appears To Lie Beyond The Natural World As It Is Now Imperfectly Understood, We Hope To Eventually Understand It And Embrace It Within The Natural. As Ever When We Unweave A Rainbow, It Will Not Become Less Wonderful.

Molecular Genetics Can Show Off Some Surprising Relationships Like, For Example, The Close Relationship Of Whales To Hippopotamuses, Which I Think Nobody Ever Guessed Until Molecular Data Was Looked At. The Closest Relatives Of Whales Are Hippopotamuses, Even Closer Than Any Other Cloven-hoofed Animals.

Dna Is Rom. It Can Be Read Millions Of Times Over, But Only Written To Once - When It Is First Assembled The Birth Of The Cell In Which It Resides.

The History Of Science Has Been One Long Series Of Violent Brainstorms, As Successive Generations Have Come To Terms With Increasing Levels Of Queerness In The Universe.

In True Natural Selection, If A Body Has What It Takes To Survive, Its Genes Automatically Survive Because They Are Inside It. So The Genes That Survive Tend To Be, Automatically, Those Genes That Confer On Bodies The Qualities That Assist Them To Survive.

I Had Always Been Scrupulously Careful To Avoid The Smallest Suggestion Of Infant Indoctrination, Which I Think Is Ultimately Responsible For Much Of The Evil In The World. Others, Less Close To Her, Showed No Such Scruples, Which Upset Me, As I Very Much Wanted Her, As I Want All Children, To Make Up Her Own Mind Freely When She Became Old Enough To Do So. I Would Encourage Her To Think, Without Telling Her What To Think.

If You Are Offended By Reading Views That Disagree With Yours, Then Yes, You Will Be Offended. However, It Is Not Gratuitously Offensive, It Simply Puts An Argument, And If Your Views Are Strong Enough, As I Believe They Are, You Will Be Able To Defend Your Views. You Will Not Say, "oh, It's Offensive, It's Offensive." You Will Say "no, You Are Wrong Here And You Are Wrong Here," And That's What You Should Do.

Most Of The Ones [nobel Prizes] That Have Gone To Muslims Have Been Peace Prizes, And The [number Of Muslims] Who Have Gotten Them For Scientific Work Is Exceedingly Low. But In Jews, It Is Exceedingly High.

What Lies At The Heart Of Every Living Thing Is Not A Fire, Not Warm Breath, Not A 'spark Of Life.' It Is Information, Words, Instructions... If You Want To Understand Life, Don't Think About Vibrant, Throbbing Gels And Oozes, Think About Information Technology.

Science, As Opposed To Technology, Does Violence To Common Sense.

Evolution Is A Very, Very Important Idea. It Is The Explanation For All Of Life - A Stunningly Simple, Yet Powerful Explanation. If You Think About It, Before Darwin, We Hadn't The Foggiest Idea Of How We Came Into Being. Now We Do. It's Still Such An Exciting Idea That It Is Well Worth Everybody Understanding It.

If Any Remedy Is Tested Under Controlled Scientific Conditions And Proved To Be Effective, It Will Cease To Be Alternative And Will Simply Become Medicine. So-called Alternative Medicine Either Hasn't Been Tested Or It Has Failed Its Tests.

Religion Has Been A Powerful Weapon In The Hands Of Governments, In The Hands Of Priests, In The Hands Of Kings Who Have Used It As A Weapon To Keep Down The Populace. It Is A Wonderful Way Of Disciplining People And Making Them Do What You Want, To Tell Them That If They Don't Do What You Want They Will, For Example, Go To Hell.

We Should Learn To Understand Natural Selection, So That We Can Oppose Any Tendency To Apply It To Human Politics.

I Am Agnostic Only To The Extent That I Am Agnostic About Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden

I Am An Enthusiastic Darwinian, But I Think Darwinism Is Too Big A Theory To Be Confined To The Narrow Context Of The Gene.

Presumably What Happened To Jesus Was What Happens To All Of Us When We Die. We Decompose. Accounts Of Jesus's Resurrection And Ascension Are About As Well-documented As Jack And The Beanstalk.

I Guess There Are Some Rights Of Parents With What They Choose Their Children To Learn, But I'm Biased In Favor Of Freeing Children To Learn And Not Letting Parents Be Too Doctrinaire In Indoctrinating Their Children.

We Admit That We Are Like Apes, But We Seldom Realize That We Are Apes.

Most People Are Never Going To Die Because They Are Never Going To Be Born

I Am Trying To Call Attention To The Elephant In The Room That Everybody Is Too Polite - Or Too Devout - To Notice: Religion, And Specifically The Devaluing Effect That Religion Has On Human Life.

That There Is A Continuous Link From Humans To Gorillas, With The Intermediate Species Merely Long Dead, Is Beyond The Understanding Of Speciesists. Tie The Label Homo Sapiens Even To A Tiny Piece Of Insensible Embryonic Tissue, And Its Life Suddenly Leaps To Infinite, Incomputable Value.... Self-styled Pro-lifers, And Others That Indulge In Footling Debates About Exactly When In Its Development A Foetus Becomes Human, Exhibit The Same Discontinuous Mentality. Human, To The Discontinuous Mind, Is An Absolutist Concept. There Can Be No Half Measures. And From This Flows Much Evil.

Why Would Anybody Be Intimidated By Mere Words? I Mean, Neither I Nor Any Other Athiest That I Know Ever Threatens Violence. We Never Threaten To Fly Planes Into Skyscrapers. We Never Threaten Suicide Bombs. We Are Very Gentle People. All We Do Is Use Words To Talk About Things Like The Cosmos, The Origin Of The Universe, Evolution, The Origin Of Life. What's There To Be Frightened Of? It's Just An Opinion.

Life Results From The Non-random Survival Of Randomly Varying Replicators. The Watchmaker Is Blind

The Fact That Somebody Does Good Doesn't Make Their Beliefs True.

What You Cannot Have Is A Gene That Sacrifices Itself For The Benefit Of Other Genes. What You Can Have Is A Gene That Makes Organisms Sacrifice Themselves For Other Organisms Under The Influence Of Selfish Genes.

Far From Being Demeaning To Human Spiritual Values, Scientific Rationalism Is The Crowning Glory Of The Human Spirit. Of Course You Can Use The Products Of Science To Do Bad Things, But You Can Use Them To Do Good Things Too.

...it Is A Telling Fact That, The World Over, The Vast Majority Of Children Follow The Religion Of Their Parents Rather Than Any Of The Other Available Religions.

You Can't Imagine How Gratifying It Is To Have A Reader Come Up To You And Say, 'you Changed My Life.'

I'm Not Much Given To Straight, Irony-free Hero-worship.

If I Were God Wanting To Make A Human Being, I Would Do It By A More Direct Way Rather Than By Evolution. Why Deliberately Set It Up In The One Way Which Makes It Look As Though You Don't Exist?

Do Those People Who Hold Up The Bible As An Inspiration To Moral Rectitude Have The Slightest Notion Of What Is Actually Written In It?

I'm Not So Fond Of The Sort Of Science Fiction That Isn't Really Science Fiction But Is Sometimes Thought To Be - Gothic Princesses And White Horses And Bats And Castles And Things.

Thus The Creationist's Favourite Question "what Is The Use Of Half An Eye?" Actually, This Is A Lightweight Question, A Doddle To Answer. Half An Eye Is Just 1 Per Cent Better Than 49 Per Cent Of An Eye.

When I Am Dying, I Should Like My Life Taken Out Under General Anaesthetic, Exactly As If It Were A Diseased Appendix.

Of Course, We Would Love To Know More About The Exact Moment Of Big Bang, But Interposing An Outside Intelligence Does Nothing To Add To That Knowledge, As We Still Know Nothing About The Creation Of That Intelligence.

Of Course In Science There Are Things That Are Open To Doubt And Things Need To Be Discussed. But Among The Things That Science Does Know, Evolution Is About As Certain As Anything We Know.

I Do Disapprove Very Strongly Of Labelling Children, Especially Young Children, As Something Like 'catholic Children' Or 'protestant Children' Or 'islamic Children.'

What Has 'theology' Ever Said That Is Of The Smallest Use To Anybody? When Has 'theology' Ever Said Anything That Is Demonstrably True And Is Not Obvious? What Makes You Think That 'theology' Is A Subject At All?

Human Vanity Cherishes The Absurd Notion That Our Species Is The Final Goal Of Evolution.

I Can't Be Sure God Does Not Exist. On A Scale Of Seven, Where One Means I Know He Exists, And Seven I Know He Doesn't, I Call Myself A Six. That Doesn't Mean I'm Absolutely Confident, That I Absolutely Know, Because I Don't.

The Beauty Of Evolution Is That It Does Provide An Explanation Of How You Can Get Complexity Out Of Simplicity. It Does It By Slow, Gradual Degree. At No Point Are You Postulating The Sudden Coming Into Existence Of A Complicated Being.

My Passion Is For Scientific Truth. I Don't Much Care About Good And Evil. ... I Care About What's True.

My Interest In Biology Was Pretty Much Always On The Philosophical Side.

Many Of Us Saw Religion As Harmless Nonsense. Beliefs Might Lack All Supporting Evidence But, We Thought, If People Needed A Crutch For Consolation, Where's The Harm? September 11th Changed All That.

You Are Born Into A Dangerous World, There Are All Sorts Of Ways In Which You Could Die, And You Need To Believe Your Parents When They Tell You Don't Go Near The Edge Of The Cliff, Or Don't Pick Up That Snake, Etc. There Could Very Well Be A Darwinian Survival Value In That Sort Of Brain Rule Of Thumb. And A By-product Of That Could Be That You Believe Your Parents When They Tell You About The Juju In The Sky, Or Whatever It Might Be.

I Think There In A Great Deal To Be Said For Religious Education In The Sense Of Teaching About Religion And Biblical Literacy. Both Those Things, By The Way, I Suspect Will Prepare A Child To Give Up Religion. If You Are Taught Comparative Religion, You Are More Likely To Realise That There Are Other Religions Than The One You Have Been Brought Up In. And If You Are If You Are Taught To Read The Bible, I Can Think Of Almost Nothing More Calculated To Turn You Off Religion.

Most People Understand That Sexual Lust Has To Do With Propagating Genes. Copulation In Nature Tends To Lead To Reproduction And So To More Genetic Copies. But In Modern Society, Most Copulations Involve Contraception, Designed Precisely To Avoid Reproduction. Altruism Probably Has Origins Like Those Of Lust.

The Very Idea That We Get A Moral Compass From Religion Is Horrible. Not Only Should We Not Get Our Moral Compass From Religion, As A Matter Of Fact We Don't.

The Truly Adult View [...] Is That Our Life Is As Meaningful, As Full And As Wonderful As We Choose To Make It. And We Can Make It Very Wonderful Indeed.

Evolution Has No Long-term Goal. There Is No Long-distance Target, No Final Perfection To Serve As A Criterion For Selection, Although Human Vanity Cherishes The Absurd Notion That Our Species Is The Final Goal Of Evolution.

Natural Selection Is The Blind Watchmaker, Blind Because It Does Not See Ahead, Does Not Plan Consequences, Has No Purpose In View. Yet The Living Results Of Natural Selection Overwhelmingly Impress Us With The Appearance Of Design As If By A Master Watchmaker, Impress Us With The Illusion Of Design And Planning.

Let Children Learn About Different Faiths, Let Them Notice Their Incompatibility, And Let Them Draw Their Own Conclusions About The Consequences Of That Incompatibility. As For Whether They Are ‘valid,’ Let Them Make Up Their Own Minds When They Are Old Enough To Do So.

In A Way, I Think Religion Is To Be Admired For Asking The Right Questions. I Just Think It's Got The Wrong Answers.

I Think What Attracts Me About The Electric Monk Is That It's Such An Eloquent Example Of The Futility Of Belief For Belief's Sake. I Mean There's Only Any Point In Believing Something If It's True.

Our Brains Are Separate And Independent Enough From Our Genes To Rebel Against Them.. We Do So In A Small Way Everytime We Use Contraception. There Is No Reason Why We Should Not Rebel In A Large Way Too.

Personally, I Rather Look Forward To A Computer Program Winning The World Chess Championship. Humanity Needs A Lesson In Humility.

If Saying That Religion Should Be A Private Matter And Should Not Have Special Influence In Public Life Is Illiberal, Then 74% Of U.k. Christians Are Illiberal, Too.

It's Known That Stress Gives Rise To Disease. It's Also Known That Many Diseases, Especially Stress-related Diseases, Can Be Cured By Placebos - Pills That Have No Medicinal Effect, But People Think They Do, And So They Do.

But, However Many Ways There May Be Of Being Alive, It Is Certain That There Are Vastly More Ways Of Being Dead, Or Rather Not Alive.

Chaos Theory, A More Recent Invention, Is Equally Fertile Ground For Those With A Bent For Abusing Sense. It Is Unfortunately Named, For 'chaos' Implies Randomness. Chaos In The Technical Sense Is Not Random At All. It Is Completely Determined, But It Depends Hugely, In Strangely Hard-to-predict Ways, On Tiny Differences In Initial Conditions.

I Love Romantic Poetry.

Romantic Poetry

We Are Survival Machines – Robot Vehicles Blindly Programmed To Preserve The Selfish Molecules Known As Genes. This Is A Truth Which Still Fills Me With Astonishment.

On One Planet [earth], And Possibly Only One Planet In The Entire Universe, Molecules That Would Normally Make Nothing More Complicated Than A Chunk Of Rock, Gather Themselves Together Into Chunks Of Rock-sized Matter Of Such Staggering Complexity That They Are Capable Of Running, Jumping, Swimming, Flying, Seeing, Hearing, Capturing And Eating Other Such Animated Chunks Of Complexity; Capable In Some Cases Of Thinking And Feeling, And Falling In Love With Yet Other Chunks Of Complex Matter.

Falling In Love

Religious Faith Not Only Lacks Evidence, Its Independence From Evidence Is Its Pride And Joy, Shouted From The Rooftops.

At The Deepest Level, All Living Things That Have Ever Been Looked At Have The Same Dna Code. And Many Of The Same Genes.

The Odd Thing About Tradition Is, The Longer It's Been Going, The More People Seem To Take It Seriously - As Though Sheer Passage Of Time Makes Something Which To Begin With Was Just Made Up, Turns It Into What People Believe As A Fact.

Many People Want To Send Their Children To Faith Schools Because They Get Good Exam Results, But They're Not Foolish Enough To Believe That It's Because Of Faith That They Get Good Exam Results.

To Be Fair, Much Of The Bible Is Not Systematically Evil But Just Plain Weird, As You Would Expect Of A Chaotically Cobbled-together Anthology Of Disjointed Documents, Composed, Revised, Translated, Distorted And 'improved' By Hundreds Of Anonymous Authors, Editors And Copyists, Unknown To Us And Mostly Unknown To Each Other, Spanning Nine Centuries

The Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus Has Shown Great Courage, In The Face Of Spiteful Vested Interests, In Demonstrating How Easy It Is For People To Concoct Memories That Are Entirely False But Which Seem, To The Victim, Every Bit As Real As True Memories.

I Became A Little Alarmed At The Number Of My Readers Who Took The Meme More Positively As A Theory Of Human Culture In Its Own Right - Either To Criticize It (unfairly, Given My Original Modest Intention) Or To Carry It Far Beyond The Limits Of What I Then Thought Justified. This Was Why I May Have Seemed To Backtrack.

Science Offers Us An Explanation Of How Complexity (the Difficult) Arose Out Of Simplicity (the Easy). The Hypothesis Of God Offers No Worthwhile Explanation For Anything, For It Simply Postulates What We Are Trying To Explain. It Postulates The Difficult To Explain, And Leaves It At That.

Gould Carried The Art Of Bending Over Backward To Positively Supine Lengths. Why Shouldn't We Comment On God, As Scientists? ... A Universe With A Creative Superintendent Would Be A Very Different Kind Of Universe From One Without. Why Is That Not A Scientific Matter?

Matthew And Luke Handle The Problem Differently, By Deciding That Jesus Must Have Been Born In Bethlehem After All. But They Get Him There By Different Routes.

It's Very Likely That Most Mammals Have Consciousness, And Probably Birds, Too.

I Think There Could Be A Very Large Number Who Are Creationists By Default. Those Are The People I Want To Reach.

A Gene Might Be Able To Assist Replicas Of Itself That Are Sitting In Other Bodies. If So, This Would Appear As Individual Altruism But It Would Be Brought About By Gene Selfishness.

Not Only Is Science Corrosive To Religion, But Religion Is Corrosive To Science. It Teaches People To Be Satisfied With Trivial Non-explanations And Blinds Them To The Wonderful Real Explanations That We Have Within Our Grasp.

I Read In The Paper Today The List Of The Most Popular Boys' Names In Britain. The First Was Jack, The Second Was Mohammed. That Makes Me Feel A Little Bit Worried.

St. Augustine Explicitly Warns Against A Very Narrow Perspective That Will Put Our Faith At Risk Of Looking Ridiculous. If You Step Back From That One Narrow Interpretation, What The Bible Describes Is Very Consistent With The Big Bang.

I Am At A Loss To Reconcile The Expensive And Glossy Production Values Of This Book With The Breathtaking Inanity Of The Content.

The Other Way Is The Multiverse Way. That Says That Maybe The Universe We Are In Is One Of A Very Large Number Of Universes. The Vast Majority Will Not Contain Life Because They Have The Wrong Gravitational Constant Or The Wrong This Constant Or That Constant. But As The Number Of Universes Climbs, The Odds Mount That A Tiny Minority Of Universes Will Have The Right Fine-tuning.

I Do Understand People When They Say That You Destroy The Magic Of Childhood If You Encourage Too Much Skeptical Questioning.

Science Is Wonderful, Science Is Important, And So Are Children, So Are Young People, And So What Could Be Better Than To Write A Science Book For Young People?

Blasphemy Is A Victimless Crime.

The Resemblance Of The Signs Of The Zodiac To The Animals After Which They Are Named... Is As Unimpressive As The Predictions Of Astrologers.

[if] There Is Mercy In Nature, It Is Accidental. Nature Is Neither Kind Nor Cruel But Indifferent.

The Essence Of Life Is Statistical Improbability On A Colossal Scale.

The Only Watchmaker Is The Blind Forces Of Physics.

If The Universe Were Just Electrons And Selfish Genes, Meaningless Tragedies ... Are Exactly What We Should Expect, Along With Equally Meaningless Good Fortune. Such A Universe Would Be Neither Evil Nor Good In Intention ... The Universe We Observe Has Precisely The Properties We Should Expect If There Is, At Bottom, No Design, No Purpose, No Evil And No Good, Nothing But Blind Pitiless Indifference.

Reductionism Is A Dirty Word, And A Kind Of 'holistier Than Thou' Self-righteousness Has Become Fashionable.

It Is Time To Stop The Mealy-mouthed Euphemisms: 'nationalists', 'loyalists', 'communities', 'ethnic Groups', 'cultures', 'civilizations'. Religions Is The Word You Need. Religions Is The Word You Are Struggling Hypocritially To Avoid.

The Theory Of Evolution By Cumulative Natural Selection Is The Only Theory We Know Of That Is In Principle Capable Of Explaining The Existence Of Organized Complexity.

Theory Of Evolution

A Delusion Is Something That People Believe In Despite A Total Lack Of Evidence.

Science Replaces Private Prejudice With Public, Verifiable Evidence.

Natural Selection, The Blind, Unconscious, Automatic Process Which Darwin Discovered, And Which We Now Know Is The Explanation Forthe Existence And Apparently Purposeful Form Of All Life, Has No Purpose In Mind. It Has No Mind And No Mind's Eye. It Does Not Plan For The Future. It Has No Vision, No Foresight, No Sight At All. If It Can Be Said To Play The Role Of The Watchmaker In Nature, It Is The Blind Watchmaker.

I Think From My Point Of View - I Won't Say It Doesn't Matter Whether [darwinian Explanations] Are Right Or Wrong, It's Just Sufficient In Some Cases, For Me, To Be Able To Say, Well, At Least It's Not Totally Implausible From A Darwinian Point Of View.

Leaders Who Forbid Their Followers To Use Effective Contraceptive Methods Express A Preference For "natural" Methods Of Population Limitation, And A Natural Method Is Exactly What They Are Going To Get. It Is Called Starvation.

...there Are No Natural Borderlines In Evolution. The Illusion Of A Borderline Is Created By The Fact That The Evolutionary Intermediates Happen To Be Extinct.

Evolution Is Not A Genetically Controlled Distortion Of One Adult Form Into Another; It Is A Genetically Controlled Alteration In A Developmental Program.

Religion: Together We Can Find The Cure.

Together We Can

Who Are We To Say That That Was An Odd Way To Do It? I Don't Think That It Is God's Purpose To Make His Intention Absolutely Obvious To Us.

Only A Tiny Fraction Of Corpses Fossilize, And We Are Lucky To Have As Many Intermediate Fossils As We Do. We Could Easily Have Had No Fossils At All, And Still The Evidence For Evolution From Other Sources, Such As Molecular Genetics And Geographical Distribution, Would Be Overwhelmingly Strong. On The Other Hand, Evolution Makes The Strong Prediction That If A Single Fossil Turned Up In The Wrong Geological Stratum, The Theory Would Be Blown Out Of The Water.

Any Entity Capable Of Intelligently Designing Something As Improbable As Dutchman's Pipe (or A Universe) Would Have To Be Even More Improbable Than A Dutchman's Pipe. Far From Terminating The Vicious Regress, God Aggravates It With A Vengeance.

Either It Is True That A Medicine Works Or It Isn't. It Cannot Be False In The Ordinary Sense But True In Some Alternative Sense. If A Therapy Or Treatment Is Anything More Than A Placebo, Properly Conducted Double-blind Trials, Statistically Analyzed, Will Eventually Bring It Through With Flying Colours. Many Candidates For Recognition As Orthodox Medicines Fail The Test And Are Summarily Dropped. The Alternative Label Should Not (though, Alas, It Does) Provide Immunity From The Same Fate.

I Am Very Comfortable With The Idea That We Can Override Biology With Free Will.

The Time Has Come For People Of Reason To Say: Enough Is Enough! Religious Faith Discourages Independent Thought, It's Divisive And It's Dangerous.

The Deceitful Misquoting Of Scientists To Suit An Anti-scientific Agenda Ranks Among The Many Unchristian Habits Of Fundamentalist Authors.

Bush And Bin Laden Are Really On The Same Side: The Side Of Faith And Violence Against The Side Of Reason And Discussion. Both Have Implacable Faith That They Are Right And The Other Is Evil.

If All The Evidence In The Universe Turned In Favour Of Creationism, I Would Be The First To Admit It, And I Would Immediately Change My Mind. As Things Stand, However, All Available Evidence (and There Is A Vast Amount Of It) Favours Evolution.

In Medieval Times, The Church Used To Sell 'indulgences' For Money. This Amounted To Paying For Some Number Of Days' Remission From Purgatory, And The Church Literally (and With Breathtaking Presumption) Issued Signed Certificates Specifying The Number Of Days Off That Had Been Purchased. . . . And Of All Its Money-making Rip-offs, The Selling Of Indulgences Must Surely Rank Among The Greatest Con Tricks In History. . . .

I Mean It As A Compliment When I Say That You Could Almost Define A Philosopher As Someone Who Won't Take Common Sense For An Answer.

Molecular Evidense Suggests That Our Common Ancestor With The Chimpanzees Lived, In Africa, Between 5 And 7 Million Years Ago, Say Half A Million Generations Ago. This Is Not Long By Evolutionary Standards.

I Find Many Of Answers In The Spiritual Realm. That In No Way Compromises My Ability To Think Rigorously As A Scientist.

It Is Almost As If The Human Brain Were Specifically Designed To Misunderstand Darwinism, And To Find It Hard To Believe

We Have The Power To Defy The Selfish Genes Of Our Birth And, If Necessary, The Selfish Memes Of Our Indoctrination. We Can Even Discuss Ways Of Deliberately Cultivating And Nurturing Pure, Disinterested Altruism - Something That Has No Place In Nature, Something That Has Never Existed Before In The Whole History Of The World. We Are Built As Gene Machines And Cultured As Meme Machines, But We Have The Power To Turn Against Our Creators. We, Alone On Earth, Can Rebel Against The Tyranny Of The Selfish Replicators.

Religion Is Unusual Among Divisive Labels In Being Spectacularly Unnecessary. If Religious Beliefs Had Any Evidence Going For Them, We Might Have To Respect Them In Spite Of Their Concomitant Unpleasantness. But There Is No Such Evidence. To Label People As Death-deserving Enemies Because Of Disagreements About Real World Politics Is Bad Enough. To Do The Same For Disagreements About A Delusional World Inhabited By Archangels, Demons And Imaginary Friends Is Ludicrously Tragic.

I Need To Learn Not To Bend Over Backwards To Be Nice To Faith-heads. Give These People An Inch And They Take A League. I Think, As I Did When I Wrote The God Delusion, That The Roman Catholic Church Is A Disgusting Institution, The Second Most Evil Religion In The World.

People Who Believe In God Conclude There Must Have Been A Divine Knob Twiddler Who Twiddled The Knobs Of These Half-dozen Constants To Get Them Exactly Right. The Problem Is That This Says, Because Something Is Vastly Improbable, We Need A God To Explain It. But That God Himself Would Be Even More Improbable.

In The Beginning Was Simplicity.

People Will Listen To Sophisticated Physicists, Using God As A Kind Of Metaphor For The Deep Constants, The Deep Problems, The Deep Principles Of Physics, And Say That In That Sense I Believe In God. The Reaction Is, "oh, This Great Physicist Believes In God - That Means I'm Free To Believe In The Trinity And In The Crucifixion And In The Reincarnation Of Christ" - And All That Stuff, Which Of Course Has Nothing Whatever To Do With The Fundamental Constants Of Physics, Which Is What These Physicists Are Talking About.

Pantheism Is Sexed-up Atheism. Deism Is Watered-down Theism.

I Suppose If You Look Back To Your Early Childhood You Accept Everything People Tell You, And That Includes A Heavy Dose Of Irrationality - You're Told About Tooth Fairies And Father Christmas And Things.

I Don't Know What To Think About Magic And Fairy Tales.

Why Did God Make Tigers So Good At Catching Prey, And At The Same Time Make Prey So Good At Getting Away From Tigers? You'd Think That If God Wanted One Thing Or The Other To Happen He'd Have Engineered It Rather Better. Maybe He Enjoyed The Spectator Sport?

Much As We Might Wish To Believe Otherwise, Universal Love And The Welfare Of The Species As A Whole Are Concepts Which Simply Do Not Make Evolutionary Sense.

My Thoughts, My Beliefs, My Feelings Are All In My Brain. My Brain Is Going To Rot.

... You Need More Than Luck To Navigate Successfully Through A Thousand Sieves In Succession.

Commonsense Lets Us Down, Because Commonsense Evolved In A World Where Nothing Moves Very Fast, And Nothing Is Very Small Or Very Large; The Mundane World Of The Familiar.

They Are In You And Me; They Created Us, Body And Mind; And Their Preservation Is The Ultimate Rationale For Our Existence. They Have Come A Long Way, Those Replicators. Now They Go By The Name Of Genes, And We Are Their Survival Machines.

I Would Challenge The Statement That My Scientific Instincts Are Any Less Rigorous Than [richard Dawkins]. The Difference Is That My Presumption Of The Possibility Of God And Therefore The Supernatural Is Not Zero, And Yours Is.

From My Perspective, God Cannot Be Completely Contained Within Nature, And Therefore God's Existence Is Outside Of Science's Ability To Really Weigh In.

Scientific Truth Is Too Beautiful To Be Sacrificed For The Sake Of Light Entertainment Or Money. Astrology Is An Aesthetic Affront. It Cheapens Astronomy, Like Using Beethoven For Commercial Jingles.

I've Always Been Antagonistic To Any Naïve Application Of The Selfish Gene Theory To Politics. Some People Have Attempted To Suggest That It Means We Are Selfish Or We Should Be Selfish.

…the Genesis Story Is Just One That Happened To Have Been Adopted By One Particular Tribe Of Middle Eastern Herders. It Has No More Special Status Than The Belief Of A Particular West African Tribe That The World Was Created From The Excrement Of Ants.

Islamic Myths Are Mostly Actually Plagiarized From The Christian Ones, Both Biblically And In Terms Of Modern Creationism. If You Read Islamic Creationist Literature, It's Pretty Much Lifted From American Evangelical Literature.

Faith Is Powerful Enough To Immunize People Against All Appeals To Pity, To Forgiveness, To Decent Human Feelings. It Even Immunizes Them Against Fear, If They Honestly Believe That A Martyr's Death Will Send Them Straight To Heaven.

I Do Think Imagination Is Enormously Valuable, And That Children Should Be Encouraged In Their Imagination. That's Very True.

God Is The Answer To All Of Those "how Must It Have Come To Be" Questions.

The Idea Of An Afterlife Where You Can Be Reunited With Loved Ones Can Be Immensely Consoling - Though Not To Me.

If Circumcision Has Any Justification At All, It Should Be Medical Only. Parents' Religion Is The Worst Of All Reasons - Pure Child Abuse.

Aquarius Is A Miscellaneous Set Of Stars All At Different Distances From Us, Which Have No Connection With Each Other Except That They Constitute A (meaningless) Pattern When Seen From A Certain (not Particularly Special) Place In The Galaxy (here).

The Hypothesis Of God Offers No Worthwhile Explanation For Anything, For It Simply Postulates What We Are Trying To Explain.

It Is A Remarkable Coincidence That Almost Everyone Has The Same Religion As Their Parents And It Always Just So Happens They're The Right Religion.

Nature Is Not Cruel, Only Pitilessly Indifferent. This Is One Of The Hardest Lessons For Humans To Learn. We Cannot Admit That Things Might Be Neither Good Nor Evil, Neither Cruel Nor Kind, But Simply Callous-indifferent To All Suffering, Lacking All Purpose.

If You Listen To Two People Who Are Arguing About Something, And They Each Of Them Have Passionate Faith That They're Right, But They Believe Different Things---they Belong To Different Religions, Different Faiths, There Is Nothing They Can Do To Settle Their Disagreement Short Of Shooting Each Other, Which Is What They Very Often Actually Do.

All The Great Religions Have A Place For Awe, For Ecstatic Transport At The Wonder And Beauty Of Creation.

Physicists Are Working On The Big Bang, And One Day They May Or May Not Solve It.

I Like To Think 'the God Delusion' Is A Humorous Book. I Think, Actually, It's Full Of Laughs. And People Who Describe It As A Polarizing Book Or As An Aggressive Book, It's Just That Very Often They Haven't Read It.

Design Cannot Precede Evolution And Therefore Cannot Underlie The Universe.

Faith Is Not The Opposite Of Reason.

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