“Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.”
Author detail
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and was a fellow of New College, Oxford. Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book *The Selfish Gene*, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982, he made a widely cited contribution to evolutionary biology with the concept, presented in his book *The Extended Phenotype*, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms. Dawkins is well known for his candid criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book *The Blind Watchmaker*, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. ([Source][1]) [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins
Quotes
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“Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.”
“The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”
“These beliefs contradict each other, so they can’t be all right”
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“Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes...”
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“A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of cons...”
“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”
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“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
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“To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, tra...”
“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...”
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“The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right...”
“The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic rel...”
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“Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.”
“Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?”
“Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.”
“My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the...”
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“Если кембриджский теолог — христианин стандартного толка, то сам он, по всей видимости, верит в ту или иную комбинацию следующих утверждений: • В праотеческие времена девственница родила сын...”
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“Дядя Лота — Авраам — является основателем всех трёх «великих» монотеистических религий. Благодаря своему патриаршему статусу он достоин служить образцом для подражания разве что чуть меньше...”
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“Рассмотрим представление о Боге. Мы не знаем, как оно возникло в мимофонде. Возможно, оно возникало многократно путем независимых «мутаций». Во всяком случае это очень старая идея. Как она р...”
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“An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of a tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your...”
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“Like most scientists, I am not a dualist, but I am nevertheless easily capable of enjoying Vice Versa and Laughing Gas.”