Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion (2006)

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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?

Richard Dawkins
Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.

Richard Dawkins
The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.

Richard Dawkins
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

Richard Dawkins
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.

Richard Dawkins
A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.

Richard Dawkins
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.

Richard Dawkins
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Richard Dawkins
However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747

Richard Dawkins
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.

Richard Dawkins
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Richard Dawkins
The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

Richard Dawkins
Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.

Richard Dawkins
It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.

Richard Dawkins
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.

Richard Dawkins
There are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.

Richard Dawkins