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The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

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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God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer.
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[Invading Iraq] will unite the entire Arab world against the West.
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Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.
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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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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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Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.
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I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'
Richard Dawkins
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Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.
Richard Dawkins
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There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think they are therefore not beyond religion too.
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It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, mad cow disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
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I find many of answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.
Richard Dawkins
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The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
Richard Dawkins
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Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance.
Richard Dawkins
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I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden
Richard Dawkins
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Islamic myths are mostly actually plagiarized from the Christian ones, both biblically and in terms of modern creationism. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.
Richard Dawkins
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Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
Richard Dawkins
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The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.
Richard Dawkins
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Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.
Richard Dawkins
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The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.
Richard Dawkins
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It could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small - at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.
Richard Dawkins