Just a bunch of quotes by Richard Dawkins from some of his books, essays and interviews. If you're interested in these subjects or want to know a little more, you can pick up one of his books, or follow the links at the end of this article.
Richard Dawkins (born March 26, 1941) is an Oxford zoologist, author, and media commentator, famous for his popular science books on evolution and his views on religion, atheism, and memetics, or "cultural evolution".
On God, Faith and Religion:
What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding.
Faith is evading the need to think, it is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.
Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.
... the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any other. Those convictions would have been completely different, and largely contradictory, if you had happened to be born in a different place.
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Seriously, check it out.
I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding... [theology] 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.
An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Killing for God is not only hideous murder — it is also utterly ridiculous.
Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labeling device in history.
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.
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.
On Science:
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
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.
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.
Science is the poetry of reality.
You don't have to be a scientist in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.
You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.
The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.
and finally. my personal favorite:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.*
Links:
Quotes on Wikiquote
The Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
TED speakers: Richard Dawkins
his Wikipedia Entry
* Complete quote:
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"*
* Dawkins has stated on many occasions that this passage will be read at his funeral.
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