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80ea966
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Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.
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cats
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Richard Dawkins |
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b79132a
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In the beginning was simplicity.
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Richard Dawkins |
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6dcf39a
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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.
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Richard Dawkins |
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b651a66
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Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.
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Richard Dawkins |
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a660bc6
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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.
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meaning
life
meaning-without-god
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Richard Dawkins |
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814d0ee
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You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.
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Richard Dawkins |
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fc939e8
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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.
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Richard Dawkins |
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872c49d
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My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.
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Richard Dawkins |
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8ade60d
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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. [...] Somebody else must be responsible for my well-being, and somebody else must be to blame if I am hurt. Is it a similar infantilism that really lies behind the 'need' for a God?
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responsibility
religion
life
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Richard Dawkins |
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ff521f8
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Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replicators to ensure their own continuation in the world? There would be plenty of time for improvement. What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look..
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Richard Dawkins |
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932886b
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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. "
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Richard Dawkins |
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507af9c
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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 worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well.
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Richard Dawkins |
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55b4279
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Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.
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Richard Dawkins |
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9de7572
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Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are all born selfish.
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Richard Dawkins |
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394e373
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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.
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Richard Dawkins |
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e4c9351
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Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.
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Richard Dawkins |
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734345e
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Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.
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jesus
morality
scripture
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Richard Dawkins |
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87160ea
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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.
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reality
science
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Richard Dawkins |
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54a7429
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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 Arabia. 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 mass..
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life
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Richard Dawkins |
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60c8b3c
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We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
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Richard Dawkins |
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b0e7369
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Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.
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religion
science
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Richard Dawkins |
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c2b217c
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The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, 'How could an organ so complex evolve?' This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity.
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Richard Dawkins |
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1e573d9
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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.
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Richard Dawkins |
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d9ba5b5
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As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. ' Michael Shermer, In The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you w..
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Richard Dawkins |
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3eb0327
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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.
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Richard Dawkins |
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cdd9838
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When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
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Richard Dawkins |
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d1cb083
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Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.
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evolution
existence
natural-selection
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Richard Dawkins |
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d25d066
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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.
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religion
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Richard Dawkins |
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8dfc71b
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Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.
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Richard Dawkins |
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71c0c97
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The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.
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Richard Dawkins |
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3a889c4
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The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.
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Richard Dawkins |
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6ef5750
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When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
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Richard Dawkins |
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1d6a210
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Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thin..
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Richard Dawkins |
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3a7302e
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I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.
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Richard Dawkins |
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50dd1b0
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Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
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Richard Dawkins |
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b25152b
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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.
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Richard Dawkins |
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933eb2a
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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.
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science
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Richard Dawkins |
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1569d1b
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The resemblance of the signs of the zodiac to the animals after which they are named... is as unimpressive as the predictions of astrologers.
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Richard Dawkins |
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5e9f0a5
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Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, "sensible" religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue."
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religion
questioning
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Richard Dawkins |
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989e72c
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Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite ... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.
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Richard Dawkins |
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1e96f17
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As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
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Richard Dawkins |
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8bcccc2
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unlike, say, the sun, or the rainbow, or earthquakes, the fascinating world of the very small never came to the notice of primitive peoples. if you think about this for a minute, it's not really surprising.. they had no way of even knowing it was there, and so of course they didn't invent any myths to explain it. it wasn't until the microscope was invented in the sixteenth century that people discovered that ponds and lakes, soil and dust, ..
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Richard Dawkins |
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043950e
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A retaliator behaves like a hawk when he is attacked by a hawk, and like a dove when he meets a dove. When he meets another retaliator he plays like a dove. A retaliator is a conditional strategist. His behaviour depends on the behaviour of his opponent.
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Richard Dawkins |
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91e1fd2
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the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.
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science
creation-myths
mythology
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Richard Dawkins |