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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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The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.
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I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using threats in order to propagate those beliefs.
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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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What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.
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Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses.
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Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.
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There is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation.
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The odd thing about tradition is, the longer it's been going, the more people seem to take it seriously - as though sheer passage of time makes something which to begin with was just made up, turns it into what people believe as a fact.
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I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas.
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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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When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.
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Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
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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?
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Race does not come into it. It is pure religion and culture. Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam. That would have been a fair comparison.
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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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I guess there are some rights of parents with what they choose their children to learn, but I'm biased in favor of freeing children to learn and not letting parents be too doctrinaire in indoctrinating their children.
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Faith is not the opposite of reason.
Richard Dawkins
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Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.
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False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.
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My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.
Richard Dawkins