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No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.

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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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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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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The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.
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My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else.
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There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other.
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My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
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Luke [the gospel writer] screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius - a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole - but it happened too late in 6 AD, long after Herod's death.
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I might respect you as a brilliant intellect, runner, musician or juggler. But respect your BELIEFS? Only if they're supported by evidence.
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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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Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.
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An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.
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I'm not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.
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People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face they seem to identify personally with it.
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Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind?
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Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil.
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Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.
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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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Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
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Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.
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The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.
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