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Sticks And Stones May Break My Bones, But Words Can Never Hurt Me." The Adage Is True As Long As You Don't Really Believe The Words. But If Your Whole Upbringing, And Everything You Have Ever Been Told By Parents, Teachers And Priests, Has Led You To Believe, Really Believe, Utterly And Completely, That Sinners Burn In Hell (or Some Other Obnoxious Article Of Doctrine Such As That A Woman Is The Property Of Her Husband), It Is Entirely Plausible That Words Could Have A More Long-lasting And Damaging Effect Than Deeds.

-Richard Dawkins

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Sticks And Stones May

Richard Dawkins

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Sticks And Stones May Break My Bones, But Words Can Never Hurt Me." The Adage Is True As Long As You Don't Really Believe The Words. But If Your Whole Upbringing, And Everything You Have Ever Been Told By Parents, Teachers And Priests, Has Led You To Believe, Really Believe, Utterly And Completely, That Sinners Burn In Hell (or Some Other Obnoxious Article Of Doctrine Such As That A Woman Is The Property Of Her Husband), It Is Entirely Plausible That Words Could Have A More Long-lasting And Damaging Effect Than Deeds.

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

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

What I Can't Understand Is Why You Invoke Improbability And Yet You Will Not Admit That You're Shooting Yourself In The Foot By Postulating Something Just As Improbable, Magicking Into Existence The Word God.

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?

Nowadays Theologians Aren't Quite So Straightforward As Paley. They Don't Point To Complex Living Mechanisms And Say That They Are Self-evidently Designed By A Creator, Just Like A Watch. But There Is A Tendency To Point To Them And Say 'it Is Impossible To Believe' That Such Complexity, Or Such Perfection, Could Have Evolved By Natural Selection. Whenever I Read Such A Remark, I Always Feel Like Writing 'speak For Yourself' In The Margin.

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

God's Existence Is Either True Or Not. But Calling It A Scientific Question Implies That The Tools Of Science Can Provide The Answer.

The Chicken Is Only An Egg’s Way For Making Another Egg.

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

Dangerous Ideas

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

What's Wrong With Being Elitist If You Are Trying To Encourage People To Join The Elite Rather Than Being Exclusive?

I Do Not Believe There Is An Atheist In The World Who Would Bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster Or Notre Dame, The Shwe Dagon, The Temples Of Kyoto Or, Of Course, The Buddhas Of Bamiyan.

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.

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.

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

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.

Science Is The Disinterested Search For The Objective Truth About The Material World.

Objective Truth

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

The True Scientific Understanding Of The Nature Of Existence Is So Utterly Fascinating; How Could You Not Want People To Share It? Carl Sagan, I Think, Said 'when You're In Love, You Want To Tell The World.' And Who, On Understanding A Scientific View Of Reality, Would Not, As It Were, Fall In Love And Want To Tell The World.

Falling In Love

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

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.

It's An Important Point To Realize That The Genetic Programming Of Our Lives Is Not Fully Deterministic. It Is Statistical - It Is In Any Animal Merely Statistical - Not Deterministic.

Isn't It A Remarkable Coincidence Almost Everyone Has The Same Religion As Their Parents ? And It Always Just Happens To Be The Right Religion. Religions Run In Families. If We'd Been Brought Up In Ancient Greece We Would All Be Worshiping Zeus And Apollo. If We Had Been Born Vikings We Would Be Worshiping Wotan And Thor. How Does This Come About ? Through Childhood Indoctrination.

The Only Watchmaker Is The Blind Forces Of Physics.

Most People, I Believe, Think That You Need A God To Explain The Existence Of The World, And Especially The Existence Of Life. They Are Wrong, But Our Education System Is Such That Many People Don't Know It.

I Think Nobody Would Claim That Random Genetic Drift Is Capable Of Producing Adaptation, That Is To Say The Illusion Of Design. Random Genetic Drift Can't Produce Wings That Are Good At Flying, Or Eyes That Are Good At Seeing, Or Legs That Are Good At Running. But Random Genetic Drift Probably Is Very Important In Driving Evolution At The Molecular Genetic Level.

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

There Is No God

Textbooks Describe Dna As A Blueprint For A Body. It's Better Seen As A Recipe For Making A Body, Because It Is Irreversible. But Today I Want To Present It As Something Different Again, And Even More Intriguing. The Dna In You Is A Coded Description Of Ancient Worlds In Which Your Ancestors Lived. Dna Is The Wisdom Out Of The Old Days, And I Mean Very Old Days Indeed.

The Physicist's Problem Is The Problem Of Ultimate Origins And Ultimate Natural Laws. The Biologist's Problem Is The Problem Of Complexity.

If God Wanted To Create Life And Create Humans, It Would Be Slightly Odd That He Should Choose The Extraordinarily Roundabout Way Of Waiting For 10 Billion Years Before Life Got Started And Then Waiting For Another 4 Billion Years Until You Got Human Beings Capable Of Worshipping And Sinning And All The Other Things Religious People Are Interested In.

Complex, Statistically Improbable Things Are By Their Nature More Difficult To Explain Than Simple, Statistically Probable Things.

Science And Religion

You Can't Statistically Explain Improbable Things Like Living Creatures By Saying That They Must Have Been Designed Because You're Still Left To Explain The Designer, Who Must Be, If Anything, An Even More Statistically Improbable And Elegant Thing.

Science Has Eradicated Smallpox, Can Immunise Against Most Previously Deadly Viruses, Can Kill Most Previously Deadly Bacteria. Theology Has Done Nothing But Talk Of Pestilence As The Wages Of Sin.

How Any Government Could Promote The Vardy Academies In The North-east Of England Is Absolutely Beyond Me. Tony Blair Defends Them On Grounds Of Diversity, But It Should Be Unthinkable In The 21st Century To Have A School Whose Head Of Science Believes The World Is Less Than 10,000 Years Old.

By All Means Let's Be Open-minded, But Not So Open-minded That Our Brains Drop Out. -this Quote Is Actually Found In Carl Sagan's Book The Demon Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark, Where He Attributes It To Engineer James Oberg, Who Says He Stole It From Someone Else.

For Me, Moral Questions Such As Stem-cell Research Turn Upon Whether Suffering Is Caused. In This Case, Clearly None Is. The Embryos Have No Nervous System. But That's Not An Issue Discussed Publicly. The Issue Is, Are They Human? If You Are An Absolutist Moralist, You Say, "these Cells Are Human, And Therefore They Deserve Some Kind Of Special Moral Treatment."

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.

My Point Is Not That Religion Itself Is The Motivation For Wars, Murders And Terrorist Attacks, But That Religion Is The Principal Label, And The Most Dangerous One, By Which A "they" As Opposed To A "we" Can Be Identified At All.

Religious People Split Into Three Main Groups When Faced With Science. I Shall Label Them The "know-nothings", The "know-alls", And The "no-contests."

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.

There Are Many Religious Points Of View Where The Conservation Of The World Is Just As Important As It Is To Scientists.

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.

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.

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.

So Occam's Razor - Occam Says You Should Choose The Explanation That Is Most Simple And Straightforward - Leads Me More To Believe In God Than In The Multiverse, Which Seems Quite A Stretch Of The Imagination.

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

The Illusion Of Design Is So Successful That To This Day Most Americans (including, Significantly, Many Influential And Rich Americans) Stubbornly Refuse To Believe It Is An Illusion.

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?

We Need A Name For The New Replicator, A Noun That Conveys The Idea Of A Unit Of Cultural Transmission, Or A Unit Of Imitation. 'mimeme' Comes From A Suitable Greek Root, But I Want A Monosyllable That Sounds A Bit Like 'gene'. I Hope My Classicist Friends Will Forgive Me If I Abbreviate Mimeme To Meme. If It Is Any Consolation, It Could Alternatively Be Thought Of As Being Related To 'memory', Or To The French Word Même. It Should Be Pronounced To Rhyme With 'cream'.

Physicists Have Come Up With Other Explanations. One Is To Say That These Six Constants Are Not Free To Vary. Some Unified Theory Will Eventually Show That They Are As Locked In As The Circumference And The Diameter Of A Circle. That Reduces The Odds Of Them All Independently Just Happening To Fit The Bill.

Why Would An All-powerful Creator Decide To Plant His Carefully Crafted Species On Islands And Continents In Exactly The Appropriate Pattern To Suggest, Irresistibly, That They Had Evolved And Dispersed From The Site Of Their Evolution?

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

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

Scientists Can Have Their Judgment Clouded By Their Professional Aspirations. And The Pure Truth Of Faith, Which You Can Think Of As This Clear Spiritual Water, Is Poured Into Rusty Vessels Called Human Beings, And So Sometimes The Benevolent Principles Of Faith Can Get Distorted As Positions Are Hardened.

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.

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.

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.

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

It's About Time We Start Criticizing Faith.

If You Were To Actually Travel Around Schools And Universities And Listen In On Lectures About Evolution You Might Find A Fairly Substantial Fraction Of Young People, Without Knowing What It Is They Disapprove Of, Think They Disapprove Of It, Because They've Been Brought Up To.

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.

People Sometimes Say That You Must Believe In Feelings Deep Inside, Otherwise You'd Never Be Confident Of Things Like 'my Wife Loves Me'. But This Is A Bad Argument. There Can Be Plenty Of Evidence That Somebody Loves You. All Through The Day When You Are With Somebody Who Loves You, You See And Hear Lots Of Little Tidbits Of Evidence, And They All Add Up. It Isn't Purely Inside Feeling, Like The Feeling That Priests Call Revelation. There Are Outside Things To Back Up The Inside Feeling: Looks In The Eye, Tender Notes In The Voice, Little Favors And Kindnesses; This Is All Real Evidence.

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.

Compassionate Doctors Sometimes Lie To Patients About The Severity Of Their Condition, And It Is Not Always Wrong To Do So.

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

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

We Humans Are An Extremely Important Manifestation Of The Replication Bomb, Because It Is Through Us - Through Our Brains, Our Symbolic Culture And Our Technology - That The Explosion May Proceed To The Next Stage And Reverberate Through Deep Space.

What Is The Purpose Of The Universe?" Is A Silly Question.

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

Purpose Of Life

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

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.

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

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's A Horrible Idea That God, This Paragon Of Wisdom And Knowledge, Power, Couldn't Think Of A Better Way To Forgive Us Our Sins Than To Come Down To Earth In His Alter Ego As His Son And Have Himself Hideously Tortured And Executed So That He Could Forgive Himself.

Evolution Is Just A Theory? Well, So Is Gravity And I Don't See You Jumping Out Of Buildings.

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

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

Religious People Are Atheists About All Other Gods, Atheists Only Take It One God Further.

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.

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.

I've Never Heard Of William Craig. A Debate With Him Might Look Good On His Resume, But It Wouldn't Look Good On Mine!

The Idea Of A Divine Creator Belittles The Elegant Reality Of The Universe.

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.

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.

In Other Words Luke's Story Is Historically Impossible And Internally Inconsistent. He Lied To Fudge The Fulfillment Of Micah's Prophesy And To Provide A Villain To Play Off Jesus In His Fictitious Drama. Matter Flows From Place To Place And Momentarily Comes Together To Be You. Some People Find That Thought Disturbing. I Find The Reality Thrilling.

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.

Everybody Is An Atheist In Saying That There Is A God - From Ra To Shiva - In Which He Does Not Believe. All That The Serious And Objective Atheist Does Is To Take The Next Step And To Say That There Is Just One More God To Disbelieve In.

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

Evolution Could So Easily Be Disproved If Just A Single Fossil Turned Up In The Wrong Date Order. Evolution Has Passed This Test With Flying Colours.

When We Started Out And We Were Talking About The Origins Of The Universe And The Physical Constants, I Provided What I Thought Were Cogent Arguments Against A Supernatural Intelligent Designer. But It Does Seem To Me To Be A Worthy Idea.

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?

Religion Is The Root Of Quite A Lot Of Evil.

Over The Centuries, We've Moved On From Scripture To Accumulate Precepts Of Ethical, Legal And Moral Philosophy. We've Evolved A Liberal Consensus Of What We Regard As Underpinnings Of Decent Society, Such As The Idea That We Don't Approve Of Slavery Or Discrimination On The Grounds Of Race Or Sex, That We Respect Free Speech And The Rights Of The Individual. All Of These Things That Have Become Second Nature To Our Morals Today Owe Very Little To Religion, And Mostly Have Been Won In Opposition To The Teeth Of Religion.

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

The Argument From Improbability, Properly Deployed, Comes Close To Proving That God Does Not Exist.

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.

You Can Never Be Absolutely Certain That Anything Doesn't Exist. But You Can Show That It's Unlikely.

I Am Thrilled To Be Alive At Time When Humanity Is Pushing Against The Limits Of Understanding. Even Better, We May Eventually Discover That There Are No Limits.

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.

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.

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

Religion Shows A Pattern Of Heredity Which I Think Is Similar To Genetic Heredity. ... There Are Hundreds Of Different Religious Sects, And Every Religious Person Is Loyal To Just One Of These. ... The Overwhelming Majority Just Happen To Choose The One Their Parents Belonged To. Not The Sect That Has The Best Evidence In Its Favour, The Best Miracles, The Best Moral Code, The Best Cathedral, The Best Stained-glass, The Best Music When It Comes To Choosing From The Smorgasbord Of Available Religions, Their Potential Virtues Seem To Count For Nothing Compared To The Matter Of Heredity.

And The Beauty Of The Anthropic Principle Is That It Tells Us, Against All Intuition, That A Chemical Model Need Only Predict That Life Will Arise On One Planet In A Billion Billion To Give Us A Good And Entirely Satisfying Explanation For The Presence Of Life Here.

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.

Religions Do Make Claims About The Universe--the Same Kinds Of Claims That Scientists Make, Except They're Usually False.

...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.

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)

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.

An Internet Meme Is A Hijacking Of The Original Idea. Instead Of Mutating By Random Change And Spreading By A Form Of Darwinian Selection, Internet Memes Are Altered Deliberately By Human Creativity. There Is No Attempt At Accuracy Of Copying, As With Genes - And As With Memes In Their Original Version.

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

A Child Is Not A Christian Child, Not A Muslim Child, But A Child Of Christian Parents Or A Child Of Muslim Parents. This Latter Nomenclature, By The Way, Would Be An Excellent Piece Of Consciousness-raising For The Children Themselves. A Child Who Is Told She Is A 'child Of Muslim Parents' Will Immediately Realize That Religion Is Something For Her To Choose -or Reject- When She Becomes Old Enough To Do So.

All Life Evolves By The Differential Survival Of Replicating Entities.

The Fear Of Hell Is A Very Powerful Motivation.

The Fact That Life Evolved Out Of Nearly Nothing, Some 10 Billion Years After The Universe Evolved Out Of Literally Nothing, Is A Fact So Staggering That I Would Be Mad To Attempt Words To Do It Justice.

What Is Interesting About The Scientific World View Is That It Is True, Inspiring, Remarkable And That It Unites A Whole Lot Of Phenomena Under A Single Heading.

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.

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.

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

If You're Willing To Answer Yes To A God Outside Of Nature, Then There's Nothing Inconsistent With God On Rare Occasions Choosing To Invade The Natural World In A Way That Appears Miraculous.

To Describe Religions As Mind Viruses Is Sometimes Interpreted As Contemptuous Or Even Hostile. It Is Both. I Am Often Asked Why I Am So Hostile To Organized Religion.

Science May Be Weird And Incomprehensible--more Weird And Less Comprehensible Than Any Theology--but Science Works. It Gets Results. It Can Fly You To Saturn, Slingshotting You Around Venus And Jupiter On The Way. We May Not Understand Quantum Theory (heaven Knows, I Don't), But A Theory That Predicts The Real World To Ten Decimal Places Cannot In Any Straightforward Sense Be Wrong.

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

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.

We Are Machines Built By Dna Whose Purpose Is To Make More Copies Of The Same Dna. ... This Is Exactly What We Are For. We Are Machines For Propagating Dna, And The Propagation Of Dna Is A Self-sustaining Process. It Is Every Living Object's Sole Reason For Living.

The Story Of Doubting Thomas Is Told, Not So That We Shall Admire Thomas, But So That We Can Admire The Other Apostles In Comparison. Thomas Demanded Evidence … The Other Apostles, Whose Faith Was So Strong That They Did Not Need Evidence, Are Held To Us As Worthy Of Imitation.

If There Is A God, It's Going To Be A Whole Lot Bigger And A Whole Lot More Incomprehensible Than Anything That Any Theologian Of Any Religion Has Ever Proposed.

If There Is A God

You Can't Understand European History At All Other Than Through Religion, Or English Literature Either If You Can't Recognise Biblical Allusions.

The Virgin Birth, The Resurrection, The Raising Of Lazarus, Even The Old Testament Miracles, All Are Freely Used For Religious Propaganda, And They Are Very Effective With An Audience Of Unsophisticates And Children

The Chances Of Each Of Us Coming Into Existence Are Infinitesimally Small, And Even Though We Shall All Die Some Day, We Should Count Ourselves Fantastically Lucky To Get Our Decades In The Sun.

I Hope Nobody Is Seriously Suggesting That We Get Our Morals From Scripture Because If We Did We'd Be Stoning People For Working On The Sabbath Or Switching On A Light On The Sabbath. So The Point Is That You Can Find Good Bits Of The Bible But You Have To Cherry-pick, You Have Reject The Nasty Bits And Pick The Nice Bits.

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

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

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

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.

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.

We Have Seen That Living Things Are Too Improbable And Too Beautifully 'designed' To Have Come Into Existence By Chance.

In Our Prehistoric Past, We Would Have Lived In Extended Families, Surrounded By Kin Whose Interests We Might Have Wanted To Promote Because They Shared Our Genes. Now We Live In Big Cities. We Are Not Among Kin Nor People Who Will Ever Reciprocate Our Good Deeds. It Doesn't Matter. Just As People Engaged In Sex With Contraception Are Not Aware Of Being Motivated By A Drive To Have Babies, It Doesn't Cross Our Mind That The Reason For Do-gooding Is Based In The Fact That Our Primitive Ancestors Lived In Small Groups.

Public Sharing Is An Important Part Of Science.

It Is All Too Easy To Mistake Passion That Can Change Its Mind For Fundamentalism, Which Never Will.

I Might Respect You As A Brilliant Intellect, Runner, Musician Or Juggler. But Respect Your Beliefs? Only If They're Supported By Evidence.

I Have Often Said That I Am A Passionate Darwinian When It Comes To Explaining Why We Exist.

Though The Details Differ Across The World, No Known Culture Lacks Some Version Of The Time-consuming, Wealth Consuming, Hostility Provoking Rituals, The Anti-factual, Counter-productive Fantasies Of Religion.

I Think I Would Abolish Schools Which Systematically Inculcate Sectarian Beliefs.

In Childhood Our Credulity Serves Us Well. It Helps Us To Pack, With Extraordinary Rapidity, Our Skulls Full Of The Wisdom Of Our Parents And Our Ancestors. But If We Don't Grow Out Of It In The Fullness Of Time, Our ... Nature Makes Us A Sitting Target For Astrologers, Mediums, Gurus, Evangelists, And Quacks. We Need To Replace The Automatic Credulity Of Childhood With The Constructive Skepticism Of Adult Science.

In The Case Of Stalinism, People Actually Distorted Science, Because It Was For The Good Of The Communist Party.

If It's Really True, That The Museum At Liberty University Has Dinosaur Fossils Which Are Labelled As Being 3000 Years Old, Then That Is An Educational Disgrace. It Is Debauching The Whole Idea Of A University, And I Would Strongly Encourage Any Members Of Liberty University Who May Be Here To Leave And Go To A Proper University.

St. Augustine Wrote That Basically It Is Not Possible To Understand What Was Being Described In Genesis. It Was Not Intended As A Science Textbook. It Was Intended As A Description Of Who God Was, Who We Are And What Our Relationship Is Supposed To Be With God.

Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

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

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.

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

Evolution Is Fundamentally Hostile To Religion.

If Your Plane Is Being Hijacked By An Armed Man Who, Though Prepared To Take Risks, Presumably Wants To Go On Living, There Is Room For Bargaining.

My Computer Is A Very Complex Gadget And It Was Designed By Many Designers, So Why Must The Universe Have Only A Single Designer And Not Many Designers?

It Is Fashionable To Wax Apocalyptic About The Threat To Humanity Posed By The Aids Virus, "mad Cow" Disease, And Many Others, But I Think A Case Can Be Made That Faith Is One Of The World's Great Evils, Comparable To The Smallpox Virus But Harder To Eradicate.

Mad Cow Disease

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.

In Two Senses: One Is That You Cannot Go On The Street And Shout That You Are An Atheist, The Other Is That You Are Never Given The Intellectual Framework For Calling Your Faith Into Question.

There's This Thing Called Being So Open-minded Your Brains Drop Out.

There Is An Anaesthetic Of Familiarity, A Sedative Of Ordinariness Which Dulls The Senses And Hides The Wonder Of Existence. For Those Of Us Not Gifted In Poetry, It Is At Least Worth While From Time To Time Making An Effort To Shake Off The Anaesthetic. What Is The Best Way Of Countering The Sluggish Habitutation Brought About By Our Gradual Crawl From Babyhood? We Can't Actually Fly To Another Planet. But We Can Recapture That Sense Of Having Just Tumbled Out To Life On A New World By Looking At Our Own World In Unfamiliar Ways.

No Matter How Much Knowledge And Wisdom You Acquire During Your Life, Not One Jot Will Be Passed On To Your Children By Genetic Means. Each New Generation Starts From Scratch.

What Francis [collins] Was Just Saying About Genesis Was, Of Course, A Little Private Quarrel Between Him And His Fundamentalist Colleagues. It Would Be Unseemly For Me To Enter In Except To Suggest That He'd Save Himself An Awful Lot Of Trouble If He Just Simply Ceased To Give Them The Time Of Day.

It Really Comes Down To Parsimony, Economy Of Explanation. It Is Possible That Your Car Engine Is Driven By Psychokinetic Energy, But If It Looks Like A Petrol Engine, Smells Like A Petrol Engine And Performs Exactly As Well As A Petrol Engine, The Sensible Working Hypothesis Is That It Is A Petrol Engine.

A Retaliator Behaves Like A Hawk When He Is Attacked By A Hawk, And Like A Dove When He Meets A Dove. When He Meets Another Retaliator He Plays Like A Dove. A Retaliator Is A Conditional Strategist. His Behaviour Depends On The Behaviour Of His Opponent.

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.

Let Us Try To Teach Generosity And Altruism, Because We Are Born Selfish.

Thought Provoking

The Alternative Which I Favor Is To Renounce All Euphemisms And Grasp The Nettle Of The Word Atheism Itself, Precisely Because It Is A Taboo Word Carrying Frissons Of Hysterical Phobia. Critical Mass May Be Harder To Achieve Than With Some Non-confrontational Euphemism, But If We Did Achieve It With The Dread Word Atheist, The Political Impact Would Be All The Greater.

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

By Dislaiming The Idea Of A Next Life, We Can Take More Excitement In This One!

I Think What I'd Really Like To See Would Be A Mass Consciousness-raising Movement So That We Would All Become Vegetarian.

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).

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.

You Could Give Aristotle A Tutorial. And You Could Thrill Him To The Core Of His Being. Aristotle Was An Encyclopedic Polymath, An All Time Intellect. Yet Not Only Can You Know More Than Him About The World, You Also Can Have A Deeper Understanding Of How Everything Works. Such Is The Privilege Of Living After Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick And Their Colleagues.

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 You Are Religious At All, It Is Overwhelmingly Probable That Your Religion Is That Of Your Parents. If You Were Born In Arkansas And You Think Christianity Is True And Islam False (knowing Full Well That You Would Think The Opposite If You Had Been Born In Afghanistan), You Are The Victim Of Childhood Indoctrination.

Let's Get Up Off Our Knees, Stop Cringing Before Bogeymen And Virtual Fathers, Face Reality, And Help Science To Do Something Constructive About Human Suffering.

Science Coverage Could Be Improved By The Recognition That Science Is Timeless, And Therefore Science Stories Should Not Need To Be Pegged To An Item In The News.

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

As My Colleague, The Physical Chemist Peter Atkins, Puts It, We Must Be Equally Agnostic About The Theory That There Is A Teapot In Orbrit Around The Planet Pluto. We Can't Disprove It. But That Doesn't Mean The Theory That There Is A Teapot Is On Level Terms With The Theory That There Isn't.

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

A Universe With A God Would Look Quite Different From A Universe Without One. A Physics, A Biology Where There Is A God Is Bound To Look Different. So The Most Basic Claims Of Religion Are Scientific. Religion Is A Scientific Theory.

A Formative Influence On My Undergraduate Self Was The Response Of A Respected Elder Statesmen Of The Oxford Zoology Department When An American Visitor Had Just Publicly Disproved His Favourite Theory. The Old Man Strode To The Front Of The Lecture Hall, Shook The American Warmly By The Hand And Declared In Ringing, Emotional Tones: "my Dear Fellow, I Wish To Thank You. I Have Been Wrong These Fifteen Years." And We Clapped Our Hands Red. Can You Imagine A Government Minister Being Cheered In The House Of Commons For A Similar Admission? "resign, Resign" Is A Much More Likely Response!

Ideally, I'd Like Everybody To Be Secular.

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.

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 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.

My Love Of Truth And Honesty Forces Me To Notice That The Liberal Intelligentsia Of Western Countries Is Betraying Itself Where Islam Is Concerned.

Alister Mcgrath Has Now Written Two Books With My Name In The Title. The Poet W. B. Yeats, When Asked To Say Something About Bad Poets Who Made A Living By Parasitizing Him, Wrote The Splendid Line, 'was There Ever Dog That Praised His Fleas?

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

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.

There Does Seem To Be A Sense In Which Physics Has Gone Beyond What Human Intuition Can Understand. We Shouldn't Be Too Surprised About That Because We're Evolved To Understand Things That Move At A Medium Pace At A Medium Scale. We Can't Cope With The Very Tiny Scale Of Quantum Physics Or The Very Large Scale Of Relativity.

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?

Anybody Who Objects To Cloning On Principle Has To Answer To All The Identical Twins In The World Who Might Be Insulted By The Thought That There Is Something Offensive About Their Very Existence. Clones Are Simply Identical Twins.

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 Think We Have Got To Start Again And Go Right Back To First Principles. The Argument I Shall Advance, Surprising As It May Seem Coming From The Author Of The Earlier Chapters, Is That, For An Understanding Of The Evolution Of Modern Man, We Must Begin By Throwing Out The Gene As The Sole Basis Of Our Ideas On Evolution. If There Is Only One Creator Who Made The Tiger And The Lamb, The Cheetah And The Gazelle, What Is He Playing At? Is He A Sadist Who Enjoys Spectator Blood Sports? ... Is He Manuvering To Maximize David Attenborough's Television Ratings?

I Am Not An Enthusiast For Diversity Of Opinion Where Facts Are Concerned.

It Is Raining Dna Outside. On The Bank Of The Oxford Canal At The Bottom Of My Garden Is A Large Willow Tree, And It Is Pumping Downy Seeds Into The Air. ... Spreading Dna Whose Coded Characters Spell Out Specific Instructions For Building Willow Trees That Will Shed A New Generation Of Downy Seeds. ... It Is Raining Instructions Out There; It's Raining Programs; It's Raining Tree-growing, Fluff-spreading, Algorithms. That Is Not A Metaphor, It Is The Plain Truth. It Couldn't Be Any Plainer If It Were Raining Floppy Discs.

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

The Universe We Observe Has Precisely The Properties We Should Expect If There Is, At Bottom, No Design, No Purpose, No Evil, No Good, Nothing But Blind, Pitiless Indifference.

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

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