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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.

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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It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any (U.S.) presidential candidate.
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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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If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous.
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We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.
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Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.
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St. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.
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Ideally, I'd like everybody to be secular.
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The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.
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What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading.
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The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike.
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Science is interesting, and if you don't agree, you can fvck off.
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The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors.
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It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.
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The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.
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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.
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We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.
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Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.
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Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.
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Very close cousins like humans and chimps have almost all their genes in common. Slightly less close cousins like humans and monkeys still have recognizably the same genes. You could carry on right on down to humans and bacteria, and you will find continuous compelling evidence for the hierarchical tree of cousinship.
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If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.
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