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[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.
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If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil.
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After sleeping through a hundred million centuries, we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life.
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My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
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I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion.
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I think there could be a very large number who are creationists by default. Those are the people I want to reach.
Richard Dawkins
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The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.
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I've seen [Lalla Ward] episodes of Doctor Who. They're good, at least partly because the scripts were written by Douglas Adams.
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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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The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.
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Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.
Richard Dawkins
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I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem.
Richard Dawkins
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Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.
Richard Dawkins
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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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If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.
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[The Internet] is by far the most important innovation in the media in my lifetime. It's like having a huge encyclopedia permanently available. There's a tremendous amount of rubbish on the world wide web, but retrieval of what you want to so rapid that it doesn't really matter
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St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God.
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Leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods express a preference for natural methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
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Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.
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A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.
Richard Dawkins