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Imagine A Crime Series In Which, Every Week, There Is A White Suspect And A Black Suspect. And Every Week, Lo And Behold, The Black One Turns Out To Have Done It. Unpardonable, Of Course. And My Point Is That You Could Not Defend It By Saying: "but It's Only Fiction, Only Entertainment."

-Richard Dawkins

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Imagine A Crime Series

Richard Dawkins

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Imagine A Crime Series In Which, Every Week, There Is A White Suspect And A Black Suspect. And Every Week, Lo And Behold, The Black One Turns Out To Have Done It. Unpardonable, Of Course. And My Point Is That You Could Not Defend It By Saying: "but It's Only Fiction, Only Entertainment."

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Some People Find Clarity Threatening. They Like Muddle, Confusion, Obscurity. So When Somebody Does No More Than Speak Clearly It Sounds Threatening.

Absolutist Morality Doesn't Have To Come From Religion But Usually Does.

The Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve - Which Runs From The Head To The Voice Box - Goes All The Way Down Into The Chest, Loops Around A Major Artery, Then Goes All The Way Back Up Again. It Goes Right Past The Larynx On The Way Down. All A Decent Designer Would Have To Do Is Loop It Off At That Point. What We're Looking At Is The Legacy Of History.

There Is No Reason To Regard God As Immune From Consideration Along The Spectrum Of Probabilities. And There Is Certainly No Reason To Suppose That, Just Because God Can Be Neither Proved Nor Disproved, His Probability Of Existence Is 50 Per Cent.

I Am One Of Those Scientists Who Feels That It Is No Longer Enough Just To Get On And Do Science. We Have To Devote A Significant Proportion Of Our Time And Resources To Defending It From Deliberate Attack From Organised Ignorance.

We Have This One Life, Let's Enjoy It, Let's Live It To The Full And Don't Get So Worked Up About Don't Identify Yourself So Passionately With This Business Called Religion.

Even If It Were True That We Need God To Be Moral, It Would Of Course Not Make God's Existence More Likely, Merely More Desirable (many People Cannot Tell The Difference)

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.

Two Religions Cannot Both Be Right, Because They Contradict Each Other, Yet They Can Both Be Wrong.

The Book Is True, And If Evidence Seems To Condtradict It, It Is The Evidence That Must Be Thrown Out Not The Book.

The Fear Of Hell Is A Very Powerful Motivation.

I Just Would Like To Say That Over More Than A Quarter-century As A Scientist And A Believer, I Find Absolutely Nothing In Conflict Between Agreeing With Richard [dawkins] In Practically All Of His Conclusions About The Natural World, And Also Saying That I Am Still Able To Accept And Embrace The Possibility That There Are Answers That Science Isn't Able To Provide About The Natural World - The Questions About Why Instead Of The Questions About How. I'm Interested In The Whys.

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.

Myths Are Fun, As Long As You Don't Confuse Them With The Truth.

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.

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 Universe Does Not Owe Us Meaning.

Francis [collins] Keeps Saying Things Like "from The Perspective Of A Believer." Once You Buy Into The Position Of Faith, Then Suddenly You Find Yourself Losing All Of Your Natural Skepticism And Your Scientific - Really Scientific - Credibility. I'm Sorry To Be So Blunt.

Finding Yourself

I Do Sometimes Accuse People Of Ignorance, But That Is Not Intended To Be An Insult. I'm Ignorant Of Lots Of Things. Ignorance Is Something That Can Be Remedied By Education.

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.

There Are Sincere Believers Who Interpret Genesis 1 And 2 In A Very Literal Way That Is Inconsistent, Frankly, With Our Knowledge Of The Universe's Age Or Of How Living Organisms Are Related To Each Other.

All Religious Beliefs Seem Weird To People Not Brought Up In Them.

I Think That A New Kind Of Replicator Has Recently Emerged On This Very Planet. It Is Staring Us In The Face. It Is Still In Its Infancy, Still Drfiting Clumsily About In Its Primeval Soup, But Already It Is Achieving Evolutionary Change At A Rate Which Leaves The Old Gene Panting Far Behind.

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

I Could Easily Believe That Religion Could Enhance Health And Hence Survival, And That Therefore There Could Be Indeed Be Literally Darwinian Survival Value, Darwinian Selection In Favor Of Religion. None Of That Of Course Bears At All Upon The Truth Value Of The Claims Made By Religions.

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.

The Mob Hysteria Over Pedophiles Has Reached Epidemic Proportions And Driven Parents To Panic. Today's Just Williams, Today's Huck Finns, Today's Swallows And Amazons Are Deprived Of The Freedom To Roam That Was One Of The Delights Of Childhood In Earlier Times (when The Actual, As Opposed To The Perceived, Risk Of Molestation Was Probably No Less).

There's No Point Of Having Faith If You Have Evidence.

It Is Grindingly, Creakingly, Crashingly Obvious That If Darwinism Was Really A Theory Of Chance, It Could Not Work.

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

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

All Animals Are Minor Variations On A Very Particular Theme.

I Great Difficulty Having Any Respect For A Religion That Has So Little Confidence In The Truth Of Its Beliefs That It Feels Reduced To Using Threats In Order To Propagate Those Beliefs.

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?

Religion Is Not The Root Of All Evil, For No One Thing Is The Root Of All Anything.

When I Say That Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines, One Shouldn't Put Too Much Emphasis On The Word 'just.' There Is A Very Great Deal Of Complication, And Indeed Beauty In Being A Gene Machine.

I Hate The Neologism "owned" For "scored A Victory Over". I Have No Intention Of Owning Anyone, And Nobody Will Ever Own Me.

Just Because Science Can't In Practice Explain Things Like The Love That Motivates A Poet To Write A Sonnet, That Doesn't Mean That Religion Can. It's A Simple And Logical Fallacy To Say, "if Science Can't Do Something Therefore Religion Can.

Hence, At The Moment Of The Creation Of The Universe, God Could Also Have Activated Evolution, With Full Knowledge Of How It Would Turn Out, Perhaps Even Including Our Having This Conversation. The Idea That He Could Both Foresee The Future And Also Give Us Spirit And Free Will To Carry Out Our Own Desires Becomes Entirely Acceptable.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

Suppose That There's A Gene That Makes You Gay If You Were Bottle-fed But That Has Some Completely Different Effect If You Were Breast-fed. So In The Days Before Bottles Were Invented That Gene Would Not Have Manifested Itself As Gay Behavior, But Now That Bottles Are Common It Can Do So.

If You Set Out In A Spaceship To Find The One Planet In The Galaxy That Has Life, The Odds Against Your Finding It Would Be So Great That The Task Would Be Indistinguishable, In Practice, From Impossible.

We Are Digital Archives Of The African Pliocene, Even Of Devonian Seas; Walking Repositories Of Wisdom Out Of The Old Days. You Could Spend A Lifetime Reading In This Ancient Library And Die Unsated By The Wonder Of It.

If Children Understand That Beliefs Should Be Substantiated With Evidence, As Opposed To Tradition, Authority, Revelation Or Faith, They Will Automatically Work Out For Themselves That They Are Atheists.

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

Purpose Of Life

I've Seen [lalla Ward] Episodes Of "doctor Who." They're Good, At Least Partly Because The Scripts Were Written By Douglas Adams.

Part Of The Appeal Was That Medawar Was Not Only A Nobel Laureate, But He Seemed Like A Nobel Laureate; He Was Everything One Thought A Nobel Laureate Ought To Be. If You Have Ever Wondered Why Scientists Like Popper, Try Medawar's Exposition. Actually Most Popperian Scientists Have Probably Never Tried Reading Anything But Medawar's Exposition.

There Are All Sorts Of Things That Would Be Comforting. I Expect An Injection Of Morphine Would Be Comforting... But To Say That Something Is Comforting Is Not To Say That It's True.

Theology Is A Non-subject. I'm Not Saying That Professors Of Theology Are Non-professors. They Do Interesting Things, Like Study Biblical History, Biblical Literature. But Theology, The Study Of Gods, The Study Of What Gods Do, Presupposes That Gods Exist. The Only Kind Of Theology That I Take Account Of Are Those Theological Arguments That Actually Argue For The Existence Of God.

Although Atheism Might Have Been Logically Tenable Before Darwin, Darwin Made It Possible To Be An Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist.

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.

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.

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.

Evolution May Explain Some Features Of The Moral Law, But It Can't Explain Why It Should Have Any Real Significance.

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.

Ironically, I Originally Wrote The Tweet With Jews And Thought, That Might Give Offense. And So I Thought I Better Change It.

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.

It Could Be That At Some Earlier Time, Somewhere In The Universe, A Civilization Evolved By Probably Some Kind Of Darwinian Means To A Very, Very High Level Of Technology- And Designed A Form Of Life That They Seeded Onto Perhaps This Planet. And I Suppose It's Possible That You Might Find Evidence For That If You Look At The Details Of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, You Might Find A Signature Of Some Sort Of Designer.

Organizing Atheists Is A Bit Like Herding Cats; They Are On The Whole Too Intelligent And Independent Minded To Lend Themselves To Being Herded.

People Who Believe The Earth Was Created 6000 Years Ago, When It's Actually 4.5 Billion Years Old, Should Also Believe The Width Of North America Is 8 Yards. That Is The Scale Of The Error.

I Can Remember At The Age Of About Six Being Fascinated By The Planets And Learning All About Mars And Venus And Things.

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. Each Believes That When He Dies He Is Going To Heaven. Each Believes That If He Could Kill The Other, His Path To Paradise In The Next World Would Be Even Swifter. The Delusional "next World" Is Welcome To Both Of Them. This World Would Be A Much Better Place Without Either Of Them.

We Animals Are The Most Complicated Things In The Known Universe.

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.

If You Look Up At The Milky Way Through The Eyes Of Carl Sagan, You Get A Feeling In Your Chest Of Something Greater Than Yourself. And It Is. But It's Not Supernatural.

I Have A Strong Feeling That The Subject Of Evolution Is Beautiful Without The Excuse Of Creationists Needing To Be Bashed.

[it] Is Capable Of Driving People To Such Dangerous Folly That Faith Seems To Me To Qualify As A Kind Of Mental Illness.

Religion Ends And Philosophy Begins, Just As Alchemy Ends And Chemistry Begins, And Astrology Ends And Astronomy Begins.

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

To Invoke The Origin Of The Dna/protein Machine By Invoking A Supernatural Designer Is To Explain Precisely Nothing - For It Leaves Unexplained The Origin Of The Designer.

Religion Is About Turning Untested Belief Into Unshakable Truth Through The Power Of Institutions And The Passage Of Time.

Superficially It's A Problem If Homosexuality Is Genetic - If The Difference Between People's Sexual Preferences Is Genetic - Because At Least A Pure Homosexual Would Be Unlikely To Reproduce And Therefore Pass On The Genes. So The First Question You Ask Is, Is It Actually Genetic, And The Answer Is Probably To Some Extent Yes.

Nothing Is Wrong With Peace And Love. It Is All The More Regrettable That So Many Of Christ's Followers Seem To Disagree.

Science Has Taught Us, Against All Intuition, That Apparently Solid Things Like Crystals And Rocks Are Really Almost Entirely Composed Of Empty Space. And The Familiar Illustration Is The Nucleus Of An Atom Is A Fly In The Middle Of A Sports Stadium, And The Next Atom Is In The Next Sports Stadium.

If We Say That Religion Is A Virus, Then Why Isn't Science A Virus?

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 Human Psyche Has Two Great Sicknesses: The Urge To Carry Vendetta Across Generations, And The Tendency To Fasten Group Labels On People Rather Than See Them As Individuals. Abrahamic Religion Gives Strong Sanction To Both-and Mixes Explosively With Both. Only The Willfully Blind Could Fail To Implicate The Divisive Force Of Religion In Most, If Not All, Of The Violent Enmities In The World Today.

Don't Ask God To Cure Cancer And World Poverty. He's Too Busy Finding You A Parking Space And Fixing The Weather For Your Barbecue.

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

Scientists Disagree Among Themselves But They Never Fight Over Their Disagreements. They Argue About Evidence Or Go Out And Seek New Evidence. Much The Same Is True Of Philosophers, Historians And Literary Critics.

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.

Does Religion Fill A Much Needed Gap? It Is Often Said That There Is A God-shaped Gap In The Brain Which Needs To Be Filled: We Have A Psychological Need For God -- Imaginary Friend, Father, Big Brother, Confessor, Confidant -- And The Need Has To Be Satisfied Whether God Really Exists Or Not. But Could It Be That God Clutters Up A Gap That We'd Be Better Off Filling With Something Else? Science, Perhaps? Art? Human Friendship? Humanism? Love Of This Life In The Real World, Giving No Credence To Other Lives Beyond The Grave?

No Doubt Soaring Cathedrals, Stirring Music, Moving Stories And Parables, Help A Bit. But By Far The Most Important Variable Determining Your Religion Is The Accident Of Birth.

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).

Dna Neither Cares Nor Knows. Dna Just Is. And We Dance To Its Music.

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

To Fill A World With ... Religions Of The Abrahamic Kind, Is Like Littering The Streets With Loaded Guns. Do Not Be Surprised If They Are Used.

I Mean, In A Way, I Feel That One Of The Reasons For Learning About Darwinian Evolution Is As An Object Lesson In How Not To Set Up Our Values And Social Lives.

There Could Be Something Incredibly Grand And Incomprehensible And Beyond Our Present Understanding.

Society Bends Over Backward To Be Accommodating To Religious Sensibilities But Not To Other Kinds Of Sensibilities. If I Say Something Offensive To Religious People, I'll Be Universally Censured, Including By Many Atheists.

My Decision To Be A Scientist Was A Bit Of A Drift Really, More Or Less By Default.

You Can't Even Begin To Understand Biology, You Can't Understand Life, Unless You Understand What It's All There For, How It Arose - And That Means Evolution.

If You Don't Understand How Something Works, Never Mind: Just Give Up And Say God Did It. You Don't Know How The Nerve Impulse Works? Good! You Don't Understand How Memories Are Laid Down In The Brain? Excellent! Is Photosynthesis A Bafflingly Complex Process? Wonderful! Please Don't Go To Work On The Problem, Just Give Up, And Appeal To God.

Evolution Never Looks To The Future.

Looking To The Future

[alternative Medicine Is Defined As] That Set Of Practices That Cannot Be Tested, Refuse To Be Tested Or Consistently Fail Tests.

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.

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 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.

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.

Religious Fanatics Want People To Switch Off Their Own Minds, Ignore The Evidence, And Blindly Follow A Holy Book Based Upon Private 'revelation'.

In The Beginning Was Simplicity.

I Read Novels For Entertainment Rather Than For Edification, So I Tend Not To Read The Sort Of Novels That Are Said To Illuminate The Human Condition.

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

But What, After All, Is Faith? It Is A State Of Mind That Leads People To Believe Something - It Doesn't Matter What - In The Total Absence Of Supporting Evidence. If There Were Good Supporting Evidence Then Faith Would Be Superfluous, For The Evidence Would Compel Us To Believe It Anyway. It Is This That Makes The Often-parroted Claim That 'evolution Itself Is A Matter Of Faith' So Silly. People Believe In Evolution Not Because They Arbitrarily Want To Believe It But Because Of Overwhelming, Publicly Available Evidence.

Yesterday's Dangerous Idea Is Today's Orthodoxy And Tomorrow's Cliché.

Dangerous Ideas

Most Thoughtful People Would Agree That Morality In The Absence Of Policing Is Somehow More Truly Moral Than The Kind Of False Morality That Vanishes As Soon As The Police Go On Strike Or The Spy Camera Is Switched Off, Whether The Spy Camera Is A Real One Monitored In The Police Station Or An Imaginary One In Heaven.

I'm Pretty Sure There Is Some Genetic Component Towards Intelligence.

Imagine A Crime Series In Which, Every Week, There Is A White Suspect And A Black Suspect. And Every Week, Lo And Behold, The Black One Turns Out To Have Done It. Unpardonable, Of Course. And My Point Is That You Could Not Defend It By Saying: "but It's Only Fiction, Only Entertainment."

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.

If It Is Solely An Evolutionary Convenience, There Is Really No Such Thing As Good Or Evil.

There's Nothing Nonsensical About Saying That What Would Evolve If Darwinian Selection Has Its Head Is Something That You Don't Want To Happen. And I Could Easily Imagine Trying To Go Against Darwinism.

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

My Last Vestige Of 'hands Off Religion' Respect Disappeared In The Smoke And Choking Dust Of September 11, 2001, Followed By The 'national Day Of Prayer,' When Prelates And Pastors Did Their Tremulous Martin Luther King Impersonations And Urged People Of Mutually Incompatible Faiths To Hold Hands, United In Homage To The Very Force That Caused The Problem In The First Place.

Faith Is Not The Opposite Of Reason.

Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines.

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.

The Messages That Dna Molecules Contain Are All But Eternal When Seen Against The Time Scale Of Individual Lifetimes. The Lifetimes Of Dna Messages Give Or Take A Few Mutations Are Measured In Units Ranging From Millions Of Years To Hundreds Of Millions Of Years; Or, In Other Words, Ranging From 10,000 Individual Lifetimes To A Trillion Individual Lifetimes. Each Individual Organism Should Be Seen As A Temporary Vehicle, In Which Dna Messages Spend A Tiny Fraction Of Their Geological Lifetimes.

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.

Certainly Science Should Continue To See Whether We Can Find Evidence For Multiverses That Might Explain Why Our Own Universe Seems To Be So Finely Tuned.

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?

Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

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

Peter Sutcliffe, The Yorkshire Ripper, Distinctly Heard The Voice Of Jesus Telling Him To Kill Women, And He Was Locked Up For Life. George W. Bush Says That God Told Him To Invade Iraq (a Pity God Didn't Vouchsafe Him A Revelation That There Were No Weapons Of Mass Destruction).

Mass Destruction

Faith Is An Evil Precisely Because It Requires No Justification And Brooks No Argument.

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.

Darwin Gives Courage To The Rest Of Science That We Shall End Up Understanding Literally Everything, Springing From Almost Nothing - A Thought Extremely Hard To Comprehend And Believe.

To Illustrate The Vain Conceit That The Universe Must Be Somehow Pre-ordained For Us, Because We Are So Well-suited To Live In It, He [douglas Adams] Mimed A Wonderfully Funny Imitation Of A Puddle Of Water, Fitting Itself Snugly Into A Depression In The Ground, The Depression Uncannily Being Exactly The Same Shape As The Puddle.

Scientific And Technological Progress Themselves Are Value-neutral. They Are Just Very Good At Doing What They Do. If You Want To Do Selfish, Greedy, Intolerant And Violent Things, Scientific Technology Will Provide You With By Far The Most Efficient Way Of Doing So. But If You Want To Do Good, To Solve The World's Problems, To Progress In The Best Value-laden Sense, Once Again, There Is No Better Means To Those Ends Than The Scientific Way.

The Moral Law Is A Reason To Think Of God As Plausible - Not Just A God Who Sets The Universe In Motion But A God Who Cares About Human Beings, Because We Seem Uniquely Amongst Creatures On The Planet To Have This Far-developed Sense Of Morality.

God Is An Idea That People Believe In And I Spend Time Arguing With People That Subscribe To That Idea(man Made Idea).

The Only Watchmaker Is The Blind Forces Of Physics.

Cloning May Be Good And It May Be Bad. Probably It's A Bit Of Both. The Question Must Not Be Greeted With Reflex Hysteria But Decided Quietly, Soberly And On Its Own Merits. We Need Less Emotion And More Thought.

The Gravitational Constant, If It Were Off By One Part In A Hundred Million Million, Then The Expansion Of The Universe After The Big Bang Would Not Have Occurred In The Fashion That Was Necessary For Life To Occur. When You Look At That Evidence, It Is Very Difficult To Adopt The View That This Was Just Chance.

Bereavement Is Terrible, Of Course. And When Somebody You Love Dies, It's A Time For Reflection, A Time For Memory, A Time For Regret.

Quantum Mechanics, That Brilliantly Successful Flagship Theory Of Modern Science, Is Deeply Mysterious And Hard To Understand. Eastern Mystics Have Always Been Deeply Mysterious And Hard To Understand. Therefore, Eastern Mystics Must Have Been Talking About Quantum Theory All Along.

I Detest 'jingle Bells,' 'white Christmas,' 'rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer,' And The Obscene Spending Bonanza That Nowadays Seems To Occupy Not Just December, But November And Much Of October, Too.

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

Regarding The Accusations Of Sexual Abuse Of Children By Catholic Priests, Deplorable And Disgusting As Those Abuses Are, They Are Not So Harmful To The Children As The Grievous Mental Harm In Bringing Up The Child Catholic In The First Place.

People Sometimes Try To Score Debating Points By Saying, Evolution Is Only A Theory. That Is Correct, But It's Important To Understand What That Means. It Is Also Only A Theory That The World Goes Round The Sun - It's Just A Theory For Which There Is An Immense Amount Of Evidence. There Are Many Scientific Theories That Are In Doubt. Even Within Evolution, There Is Some Room For Controversy. But That We Are Cousins Of Apes And Jackals And Starfish, Let's Say, That Is A Fact In The Ordinary Sense Of The Word.

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.

So It Is Best To Keep An Open Mind And Be Agnostic. At First Sight That Seems An Unassailable Position, At Least In The Weak Sense Of Pascal's Wager. But On Second Thoughts It Seems A Cop-out, Because The Same Could Be Said Of Father Christmas And Tooth Fairies. There May Be Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden. There Is No Evidence For It, But You Can't Prove That There Aren't Any, So Shouldn't We Be Agnostic With Respect To Fairies?

I Didn't Have A Very Starry School Career, I Was Medium To Above Average, Nothing Special.

I Mean I Think That When You've Got A Big Brain, When You Find Yourself Planted In A World With A Brain Big Enough To Understand Quite A Lot Of What You See Around You, But Not Everything, You Naturally Fall To Thinking About The Deep Mysteries. Where Do We Come From? Where Does The World Come From? Where Does The Universe Come From?

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

One Of The Possible Reasons Why We Might Be Good Is That We're Frightened, Frightened Of God. We Want The Reward In Heaven, We Don't Want To Go To Hell. That Would Be An Ignoble, Ignominious Reason For Being Good, And I Think That If Anybody Was Good To You Just Because They Hoped For A Heavenly Reward, You Wouldn't Respect Them, You'd Probably Give Them A Wide Berth.

It Doesn't Hurt My Feeling When I Get Vilified By Fundamentalist Religious People. I've Actually Made Comedy Out Of It. I've Made Light Of That.

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.

I Do Feel Visceral Revulsion At The Burka Because For Me It Is A Symbol Of The Oppression Of Women.

When Two Opposite Points Of View Are Expressed With Equal Intensity, The Truth Does Not Necessarily Lie Exactly Half Way Between. It Is Possible For One Side Simply To Be Wrong.

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 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.

[jay] Gould Sets Up An Artificial Wall Between The Two Worldviews That Doesn't Exist In My Life.

Undisguised Clarity Is Easily Mistaken For Arrogance.

I Doubt That Religion Can Survive Deep Understanding. The Shallows Are Its Natural Habitat. Cranks And Fundamentalists Are Too Often Victimised As Scapegoats For Religion In General. It Is Only Quite Recently That Christianity Reinvented Itself In Non-fundamentalist Guise, And Islam Has Yet To Do So.

Deep Understanding

I Think Looking Back To My Own Childhood, The Fact That So Many Of The Stories I Read Allowed The Possibility Of Frogs Turning Into Princes, Whether That Has A Sort Of Insidious Affect On Rationality, I'm Not Sure. Perhaps It's Something For Research.

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.

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?

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).

Bertrand Russell Used A Hypothetical Teapot In Orbit About Mars For The Same Didactic Purpose. You Have To Be Agnostic About The Teapot, But That Doesn't Mean You Treat The Likelihood Of Its Existence As Being On All Fours With Its Non-existence.

Next Time That Somebody Tells You Something Is True, Why Not Say To Them: 'what Kind Of Evidence Is There For That?' And If They Can't Give You A Good Answer, I Hope You'll Think Very Carefully Before You Believe A Word They Say.

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

I Think The World's Always A Better Place If People Are Filled With Understanding.

It's Very Important To Try To Inculcate Into Children Moral Rules, Such As "do As You Would Be Done By."

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.

It Has Been Convincingly Demonstrated That Countries Where There Are High Rates Of Poverty, Or High Rates Of Economic Inequality, Are The Countries With The Highest Rates Of Religious Beliefs.

Economic Inequality

Scientific Beliefs Are Supported By Evidence, And They Get Results. Myths And Faiths Are Not And Do Not.

I Would Like To Find A Way In Which People In Saudi Arabia Could Learn That They Can Be Something Other Than A Muslim. Some People May Not Realize This. Of Course, There Is The Problem That You Can Get In Trouble Or Get Stoned.

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.

We Cannot Prove That There Is No God, But We Can Safely Conclude The He Is Very, Very Improbable Indeed.

There Is No God

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

The Enlightenment Is Under Threat. So Is Reason. So Is Truth. So Is Science, Especially In The Schools Of America.

People Who Do Not Know The Bible Well Have Been Gulled Into Thinking It Is A Good Guide To Morality. This Mistaken View May Have Motivated The "millionaire Conservative Party Donors". I Have Even Heard The Cynically Misanthropic Opinion That, Without The Bible As A Moral Compass, People Would Have No Restraint Against Murder, Theft And Mayhem. The Surest Way To Disabuse Yourself Of This Pernicious Falsehood Is To Read The Bible Itself.

Even If It Were True That Evolution, Or The Teaching Of Evolution, Encouraged Immorality That Would Not Imply That The Theory Of Evolution Was False.

Theory Of Evolution

Religious Faith, Is A State Of Mind, That Leads People To Believe In Something, It Doesn't Matter What, Without A Whisper Of Doubt, Or A Whiff Of Evidence, And Believe So Strongly In Some Cases, That They Are Prepare To Kill And Die For It, Without The Need For Further Justification.

As Long As We Accept The Principle That Religious Faith Must Be Respected Simply Because It Is Religious Faith, It Is Hard To Withhold Respect From The Faith Of Osama Bin Laden And The Suicide Bombers

I Don't Think God Is An Explanation At All. It's Simply Redescribing The Problem. We Are Trying To Understand How We Have Got A Complicated World, And We Have An Explanation In Terms Of A Slightly Simpler World, And We Explain That In Terms Of A Slightly Simpler World And It All Hangs Together Down To An Ultimately Simple World. Now, God Is Not An Explanation Of That Kind. God Himself Cannot Be Simple If He Has Power To Do All The Things He Is Supposed To Do.

Complicated World

Mysteries Do Not Lose Their Poetry When Solved. Quite The Contrary; The Solution Often Turns Out More Beautiful Than The Puzzle And, In Any Case, When You Have Solved One Mystery You Uncover Others, Perhaps To Inspire Greater Poetry

I Am Against Religion Because It Teaches Us To Be Satisfied With Not Understanding The World.

I Do Like Philip Pullman.and That's An Exception Because Philip Pullman's Books Allow Magic.

I Am Not Absolutely Positive There Is No God. Only In The Sense That I'm Not Absolutely Positive There Is No Large China Teapot In Orbit In The Solar System.

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

Blindness To Suffering Is An Inherent Consequence Of Natural Selection. Nature Is Neither Kind Nor Cruel But Indifferent.

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 More Than 20 Percent Of Nobel Prizes Have Been Won By Jews.

Any Belief In Miracles Is Flat Contradictory Not Just To The Facts Of Science But To The Spirit Of Science.

Beliefs. Once Entrenched In A Culture, They Persist, Evolve And Diverge, In A Manner Reminiscent Of Biological Evolution.

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.

That Was Unfortunate. I Should Have Compared Religion With Religion And Compared Islam Not With Trinity College But With Jews, Because The Number Of Jews Who Have Won Nobel Prizes Is Phenomenally High.

I Think That [paul] Bloom's Approach - And Others Who Take It - Is Not So Much That There Is A Precise Genetic Basis To Faith. But There Is A Genetic Basis To A Psychological Predisposition That Manifests Itself As Faith And Religion Under The Right Conditions.

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.

By All Means Let's Be Open-minded, But Not So Open-minded That Our Brains Drop Out.

If Bush And Blair Are Eventually Put On Trial For War Crimes, I Shall Not Be Among Those Pressing For Them To Be Hanged.

The Roman Catholic Church Is An Institution For Whose Gains The Phrase "ill-gotten" Might Have Been Specially Invented. And Of All Its Money-making Rip-offs, The Selling Of Indulgences Must Surely Rank Among The Greatest Con Tricks In History, The Medieval Equivalent Of The Nigerian Internet Scam But Far More Successful.

Cheetah Genes Cooperate With Cheetah Genes But Not With Camel Genes, And Vice Versa. This Is Not Because Cheetah Genes, Even In The Most Poetic Sense, See Any Virtue In The Preservation Of The Cheetah Species. They Are Not Working To Save The Cheetah From Extinction Like Some Molecular World Wildlife Fund.

If You Divide Christians Into Denominations, Agnostics And Atheists Come In Third, Behind Catholics And Baptists. That's Interesting When You Contrast It With The Lack Of Influence Of Nonbelievers.

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