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I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn't exist. But you can show that it's unlikely.
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It's about time we start criticizing faith.
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Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.
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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.
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It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).
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It is an absurd law [Section 295A of the Indian penal code] but also extremely dangerous because it gives fanatics, whether they are Hindus, Catholics or Muslims, a licence to be offended. It also allows people who are in dispute with you to make up false accusations of blasphemy.
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The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.
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I am persuaded that 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like...eternal hell.
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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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You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
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It is interesting to ask whether there's any general reason why being religious might make you do nice things or indeed nasty things. It's possible that people do nice things because they're religious. One reason might be they're hoping for a reward in Heaven, which is not a very noble reason.
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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.
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If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.
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If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.
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If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.
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Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.
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Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
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Ironically, I originally wrote the tweet with Jews and thought, That might give offense. And so I thought I better change it.
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Without gradualness...we are back to a miracle.
Richard Dawkins
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The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.
Richard Dawkins