Richard Dawkins is one of the great outspoken minds of our times. While I do enjoy listening to him, sometimes a written quote is just as powerful. Dawkins is not afraid to say things that others shy away from.
So, here are some Great quotes by the Great Richard Dawkins:
1. “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.”
2. “…when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”
3. “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?”
4. “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
5. “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?”
6. “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.”
7. “…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.”
8. “The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.”
9. “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?”
10. “We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.”
11. “Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won’t know it, and may even vigorously deny it.”
12. “The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale”
13. “It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work.”
14. “With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns.”
15. “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
16. “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
17. “isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
18. “Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.”
19. “Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven.”
20. “If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it.”
Which one is your favourite?
Saturday, December 5th, 2009
No Comments 
Posted by The Lazy Populist in Activism, Canada, International, Politics 
