Quotes by Richard Dawkins

Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain Gods approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? Thats not morality, thats 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.

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 Pascals 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 cant prove that there arent any, so shouldnt we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

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?

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

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. . . . The truly adult view, by contrast, 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.

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.

Science is the poetry of reality.

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

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.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

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

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, wheres the harm? September 11th changed all that.

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.

The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different now. ‘All is changed, changed utterly.

Why, I cant help wondering, is God thought to need such ferociousdefence? One might have supposed him amply capable of lookingafter himself.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration tomoral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually writtenin it?

Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical.