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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

-Richard Dawkins

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To Be Fair, Much

Richard Dawkins

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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

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Not A Single One Of Your Ancestors Died Young. They All Copulated At Least Once.

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.

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

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.

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.

All The World’s Muslims Have Fewer Nobel Prizes Than Trinity College, Cambridge. They Did Great Things In The Middle Ages, Though.

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.

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.

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

We Should Take Astrology Seriously. No, I Don't Mean We Should Believe In It. I Am Talking About Fighting It Seriously Instead Of Humouring It As A Piece Of Harmless Fun.

[r]eductionism' Is One Of Those Things, Like Sin, That Is Only Mentioned By People Who Are Against It. To Call Oneself A Reductionist Will Sound, In Some Circles, A Bit Like Admitting To Eating Babies. But, Just As Nobody Actually Eats Babies, So Nobody Is Really A Reductionist In Any Sense Worth Being Against.

It Is A Virtue To Admit Ignorance When You Don't Know, But Not To Wallow In Ignorance As An End In Itself. People Say If We Don't Believe God Is Watching Over Us, We Abandon Morality. Are They Right?

It Could Be Any Of A Billion Gods. It Could Be God Of The Martians Or Of The Inhabitants Of Alpha Centauri. The Chance Of Its Being A Particular God, Yahweh, The God Of Jesus, Is Vanishingly Small - At The Least, The Onus Is On You To Demonstrate Why You Think That's The Case.

What Are All Of Us But Self-reproducing Robots? We Have Been Put Together By Our Genes And What We Do Is Roam The World Looking For A Way To Sustain Ourselves And Ultimately Produce Another Robot Child.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Machine Code Of The Genes Is Uncannily Computer-like. Apart From Differences In Jargon, The Pages Of A Molecular Biology Journal Might Be Interchanged With Those Of A Computer Engineering Journal.

Molecular Biology

Religions Are Not Imaginative, Not Poetic, Not Soulful. On The Contrary, They Are Parochial, Small-minded, Niggardly With The Human Imagination, Precisely Where Science Is Generous.

I Have Never Quite Understood - And This Is No Doubt My Failing - I Never Quite Understood Why You Would Read Fiction To Understand The Human Condition.

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.

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.

Presumably There Is Indeed No Purpose In The Ultimate Fate Of The Cosmos, But Do Any Of Us Really Tie Our Life's Hopes To The Ultimate Fate Of The Cosmos Anyway? Of Course We Don't; Not If We Are Sane. Our Lives Are Ruled By All Sorts Of Closer, Warmer, Human Ambitions And Perceptions.

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.

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

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

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.

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

'take Offense At The Drop Of A Hat' Is The Unwritten Eleventh Commandment.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

Purpose Of Life

Offense Is What People Take When They Can't Take Argument.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our Own Existence Once Presented The Greatest Of All Mysteries, But ... It Is A Mystery No Longer Because It Is Solved. Darwin And Wallace Solved It ... I Was Surprised That So Many People Seemed Not Only Unaware Of The Elegant And Beautiful Solution To This Deepest Of Problems But, Incredibly, In Many Cases Actually Unaware That There Was A Problem In The First Place!

Faith Is Not The Opposite Of Reason.

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. . . .

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.

Science Tells Us What We Have Reason To Believe. Not What We Have A Duty To Believe. Not What Experts, In Their Pontificating Wisdom, Instruct Us To Believe... No, Science Tells Us What There Is Good Reason To Believe.

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.

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

False Beliefs Can Be Every Bit As Consoling As True Ones, Right Up Until The Moment Of Disillusionment.

I Don't Feel Depressed. I Feel Elated.

I Think That The Bible As Literature Should Be A Compulsory Part Of The National Curriculum.. You Can't Understand English Literature And Culture Without It. But Insofar As Theology Studies The Nature Of The Divine, It Will Earn The Right To Be Taken Seriously When It Provides The Slightest, Smallest Smidgen Of A Reason For Believing In The Existence Of The Divine. Meanwhile, We Should Devote As Much Time To Studying Serious Theology As We Devote To Studying Serious Fairies And Serious Unicorns.

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.

Atheists Are The New Gays; In The Closet And Pretty Much Disqualified From Public Office.

I'm Not One Of Those Who Wants To Purge Our Society Of Our Christian History.

If The History-deniers Who Doubt The Fact Of Evolution Are Ignorant Of Biology, Those Who Think The World Began Less Than Ten Thousand Years Ago Are Worst Than Ignorant, They Are The Deluded To The Point Of Perversity.

If Children Were Taught To Question And Think Through Their Beliefs, Instead Of Being Taught The Superior Virtue Of Faith Without Question, It Is A Good Bet That There Would Be No Suicide Bombers.

The Distribution Of Species On Islands And Continents Throughout The World Is Exactly What You'd Expect If Evolution Was A Fact. The Distribution Of Fossils In Space And In Time Are Exactly What You Would Expect If Evolution Were A Fact. There Are Millions Of Facts All Pointing In The Same Direction And No Facts Pointing In The Wrong Direction.

Atheists Sometimes Come Across As A Bit Arrogant In This Regard, And Characterizing Faith As Something Only An Idiot Would Attach Themselves To.

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.

Do You Really Mean The Only Reason You Try To Be Good Is To Gain God's Approval And Reward? That's Not Morality, That's Just Sucking Up.

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.

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

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.

The Universe Is A Strange And Wondrous Place. The Truth Is Quite Odd Enough To Need No Help From Pseudoscientific Charlatans.

A Delusion That Encourages Belief Where There Is No Evidence Is Asking For Trouble. Disagreements Between Incompatible Beliefs Cannot Be Settled By Reasoned Argument Because Reasoned Argument Is Drummed Out Of Those Trained In Religion From The Cradle. Instead, Disagreements Are Settled By Other Means Which, In Extreme Cases, Inevitably Become Violent. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Most Of What We Strive For In Our Modern Life Uses The Apparatus Of Goal Seeking That Was Originally Set Up To Seek Goals In The State Of Nature.

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.

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.

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.

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

Creationism: God's Gift To The Ignorant.

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

If A Healing Technique Is Demonstrated To Have Curative Properties In Properly Controlled Double-blind Trials, It Ceases To Be Alternative. It Simply, As Diamond Explains, Becomes Medicine.

Ideally, I'd Like Everybody To Be Secular.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Christianity, Just As Much As Islam, Teaches Children That Unquestioned Faith Is A Virtue. You Don't Have To Make The Case For What You Believe. If Somebody Announces That It Is Part Of His Faith, The Rest Of Society, Whether Of The Same Faith, Or Another, Or Of None, Is Obliged, By Ingrained Custom, To "respect" It Without Question; Respect It Until The Day It Manifests Itself In A Horrible Massacre Like The Destruction Of The World Trade Center, Or The London Or Madrid Bombings.

Bad Things, Like Good Things Don't Happen Any More Often Than They Ought To By Chance. The Universe Has No Mind, No Feelings, And No Personality, So It Doesn't Do Things In Order To Either Hurt Or Please You. Bad Things Happen Because Things Happen.

There Is A Popular Cliché ... Which Says That You Cannot Get Out Of Computers Any More Than You Have Put In..., That Computers Can Only Do Exactly What You Tell Them To, And That Therefore Computers Are Never Creative. This Cliché Is True Only In A Crashingly Trivial Sense, The Same Sense In Which Shakespeare Never Wrote Anything Except What His First Schoolteacher Taught Him To Write-words.

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

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

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

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

The List Of Things About Which We Strictly Have To Be Agnostic Doesn't Stop At Tooth Fairies And Celestial Teapots. It Is Infinite. If You Want To Believe In A Particular One Of Them - Teapots, Unicorns, Or Tooth Fairies, Thor Or Yahweh - The Onus Is On You To Say Why You Believe In It. The Onus Is Not On The Rest Of Us To Say Why We Do Not. We Who Are Atheists Are Also A-fairyists, A-teapotists, And A-unicornists, But We Don't Have To Bother Saying So.

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.

They Are Either People Of Faith Who Have Lost Their Faith From Reading My Books, Or They Are People Who Had Already Lost Their Faith, And Something About My Books Encouraged Them To Affirm That.

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.

We, Alone On Earth, Can Rebel Against The Tyranny Of The Selfish Replicators.

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.

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.

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

...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.

I Sympathize With Politicians Who Have To Watch Every Syllable They Utter For Fear It Will Be Misused By Somebody With An Agenda.

Do You Really Mean To Tell Me The Only Reason You Try To Be Good Is To Gain God's Approval And Reward, Or To Avoid His Disapproval And Punishment? That's Not Morality, That's Just Sucking Up, Apple-polishing, Looking Over Your Shoulder At The Great Surveillance Camera In The Sky, Or The Still Small Wiretap Inside Your Head, Monitoring Your Every Move, Even Your Every Base Though.

Surveillance Cameras

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.

Some Sort Of Belief In All-powerful Supernatural Beings Is Common, If Not Universal. A Tendency To Obey Authority, Perhaps Especially In Children, A Tendency To Believe What You're Told, A Tendency To Fear Your Own Death, A Tendency To Wish To See Your Loved Ones Who Have Died, To Wish To See Them Again, A Wish To Understand Where You Came From, Where The World Came From, All These Psychological Predispositions, Under The Right Cultural Conditions, Tend To Lead To People Believing In Things For Which There Is No Evidence.

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

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.

Evil…doesn’t Mean Doing Things That Have Bad Consequences For People. It Means Private Thoughts And Actions That Are Not To “the Christian Majority’s” Private Liking.

If We Are Too Friendly To Nice, Decent Bishops, We Run The Risk Of Buying Into The Fiction That There's Something Virtuous About Believing Things Because Of Faith Rather Than Because Of Evidence. We Run The Risk Of Betraying Scientific Enlightenment.

I Shall Not Make An Argument Ad Hominem. My Argument Is Ad Bullshitem.

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

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.

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

If Complex Organisms Demand An Explanation, So Does A Complex Designer. And It's No Solution To Raise The Theologian's Plea That God (or The Intelligent Designer) Is Simply Immune To The Normal Demands Of Scientific Explanation. To Do So Would Be To Shoot Yourself In The Foot. You Cannot Have It Both Ways. Either Id Belongs In The Science Classroom, In Which Case It Must Submit To The Discipline Required Of A Scientific Hypothesis. Or It Does Not, In Which Case, Get It Out Of The Science Classroom And Send It Back To Church, Where It Belongs.

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

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.

Biology Is The Study Of Complicated Things That Give The Appearance Of Having Been Designed For A Purpose

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I Get The Feeling More And More That Religion Is Being Left Behind.

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.

Do Humans Have A Different Moral Significance Than Cows In General?

After Sleeping Through A Hundred Million Centuries, We Have Finally Opened Our Eyes On A Sumptuous Planet, Sparkling With Color, Bountiful With Life.

I Think We Certainly Benefit From Social Institutions Which Encourage Us Towards Moral Behavior. It's Very Important To Have Law. It's Very Important To Have A Moral Education.

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

Humans Have More Moral Responsibility Perhaps, Because They Are Capable Of Reasoning.

The Solution Often Turns Out More Beautiful Than The Puzzle.

Each Step Is Not Too Improbable For Us To Countenance, But When You Add Them Up Cumulatively Over Millions Of Years, You Get These Monsters Of Improbability, Like The Human Brain And The Rain Forest. It Should Warn Us Against Ever Again Assuming That Because Something Is Complicated, God Must Have Done It.

[richard Leakey Is] A Robust Hero Of A Man, Who Actually Lives Up To The Cliché, “a Big Man In Every Sense Of The Word.” Like Other Big Men He Is Loved By Many, Feared By Some, And Not Over-preoccupied With The Judgments Of Any.

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.

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

I Do Object To The Assumption That Anything That Might Be Outside Of Nature Is Ruled Out Of The Conversation. That's An Impoverished View Of The Kinds Of Questions We Humans Can Ask, Such As "why Am I Here?", "what Happens After We Die?", "is There A God?" If You Refuse To Acknowledge Their Appropriateness, You End Up With A Zero Probability Of God After Examining The Natural World Because It Doesn't Convince You On A Proof Basis.

I Am Passionate About Truth And Passionate About Clarity, And I Don't Regard Myself As Particularly Militant Or Aggressive. I Simply Wish To Discuss What Is True And To Listen To Evidence And Put Evidence Forward To Other People And Have A Sensible, Sane, Moderated Argument.

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

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.

I Do Believe That Nice Religious People Make The World Safe For Extremists By Teaching Us [...] That Faith Is A Virtue, Teaching Us That There's Something Good About Holding Beliefs Without Any Substantiating Evidence. Once You Buy Into That, [...] Then The Door Is Opened To Extremists Who Defend Their Extremism By Saying, 'oh Well, It's My Faith, You Can't Touch It, You Can't Criticise My Faith, I Don't Even Need To Defend It Because Faith Is Faith.'

Blasphemy Is A Victimless Crime.

We Don't Need Fossils - The Case For Evolution Is Watertight Without Them; So It Is Paradoxical To Use Gaps In The Fossil Record As Though They Were Evidence Against Evolution

The Total Amount Of Suffering Per Year In The Natural World Is Beyond All Decent Contemplation. During The Minute That It Takes Me To Compose This Sentence, Thousands Of Animals Are Being Eaten Alive, Many Others Are Running For Their Lives, Whimpering With Fear, Others Are Slowly Being Devoured From Within By Rasping Parasites, Thousands Of All Species Are Dying Of Starvation, Thirst, And Disease. The Universe That We Observe Has Precisely The Properties We Should Expect If There Is, At Bottom, No Design, No Purpose, No Evil, No Good, Nothing But Pitiless Indifference.

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

The Question Of Whether There Exists A Supernatural Creator, A God, Is One Of The Most Important That We Have To Answer. I Think That It Is A Scientific Question. My Answer Is No.

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?

People Really, Really Hate Their Religion Being Criticized. It's As Though You've Said They Had An Ugly Face; They Seem To Identify Personally With It.

Something Pretty Mysterious Had To Give Rise To The Origin Of The Universe.

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

Sometimes In Life It Is A Good Idea To Stop,sometimes It Is A Good Idea To Go On. The Trick Is To Decide When To Stop

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?

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.

Some Physicists Solve That Problem Of The Necessity Of Finely Tuned Physical Constants ... By Invoking The Anthropic Principle, Saying, Well, Here We Are, We Exist, We Have To Be In The Kind Of Universe Capable Of Giving Rise To Us. That In Itself Is, I Think, Unsatisfying, And As John Lennox Rightly Says, Some Physicists Solve That By The Multiverse Idea-the Idea That Our Universe Is Just One Of Many Universes.

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

My God Is Not Improbable To Me. He Has No Need Of A Creation Story For Himself Or To Be Fine-tuned By Something Else.

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.

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).

I Am Not Advocating A Morality Based On Evolution.

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.

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

There Are People In The World Who Desperately Want Not To Have To Believe In Darwinism .

Secularism Is Categorically Not Saying That The Religious May Not Speak Out Publicly Or Have A Say In Public Life. It Is About Saying That Religion Alone Should Not Confer A Privileged Say In Public Life, Or Greater Influence On It. It Really Is As Simple As That.

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.

A God Who Is Capable Of Sending Intelligible Signals To Millions Of People Simultaneously, And Of Receiving Messages From All Of Them Simultaneously, Cannot Be, Whatever Else He Might Be, Simple. Such Bandwidth!

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

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.

Evolution Has Been Observed. It's Just That It Hasn't Been Observed While It's Happening.

Evolution Normally Does Not Come To A Halt, But Constantly 'tracks' The Changing Environment.

Changing Environment

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

Religion Teaches You To Be Satisfied With Nonanswers. It’s A Sort Of Crime Against Childhood.

The Truth Is More Magical - In The Best And Most Exciting Sense Of The Word - Than Any Myth Or Made-up Mystery Or Miracle. Science Has Its Own Magic: The Magic Of Reality.

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.

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?

The World And The Universe Is An Extremely Beautiful Place, And The More We Understand About It The More Beautiful Does It Appear.

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?

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

There Is Something So Mysterious That It Is Almost Like God. God Is In The Equations. God Is In The Fundamental Constants. And That's Fine. I Mean, That's Just Redefinition Of That Which We Find Mysterious At The Basis Of The Universe.

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

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.

Religion: Together We Can Find The Cure.

Together We Can

There Is Something Wrong With Using Faith - Belief Without Evidence - As A Political Weapon. I Wouldn't Say There Is Something Similar About Using Science. Science - Or The Products Of Science Like Technology - Is Just A Way Of Achieving Something Real, Something That Happens, Something That Works.

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

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 Mercy In Nature, It Is Accidental. Nature Is Neither Kind Nor Cruel But Indifferent.

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

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

Objective Truth

I Don't See That [richard] Dawkins' Basic Account Of Evolution Is Incompatible With God's Having Designed It.

Evolution Is As Much A Fact As The Heat Of The Sun.

Heat Of The Sun

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

We Are A Very, Very Unusual Species.

I'm A Cultural Christian In The Same Way Many Of My Friends Call Themselves Cultural Jews Or Cultural Muslims.

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.

Genome Sequencing Has Changed Taxonomy.

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.

The Cynic About Human Nature Might Say That Religious Morality Is An Effective Way Of Keeping People In Line. The Threat Of Hell, The Reward Of Heaven, But The Rules Of The Holy Books Are Out Of Date And Often Barbaric.

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

Nobody Would Seriously Describe A Tiny Child As A Marxist Child Or An Anarchist Child Or A Post-modernist Child. Yet Children Are Routinely Labelled With The Religion Of Their Parents. We Need To Encourage People To Think Carefully Before Labelling Any Child Too Young To Know Their Own Opinions And Our Adverts Will Help To Do That.

If You Want To Do Evil, Science Provides The Most Powerful Weapons To Do Evil; But Equally, If You Want To Do Good, Science Puts Into Your Hands The Most Powerful Tools To Do So

Who Will Say With Confidence That Sexual Abuse Is More Permanently Damaging To Children Than Threatening Them With The Eternal And Unquenchable Fires Of Hell?

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