Notwithstanding his somewhat dodgy family values, Jesus’ ethical teachings were – at least by comparison with the ethical disaster area that is the Old Testament – admirable; but there are other teachings in the New Testament that no good person should support. I refer especially to the central doctrine of Christianity: that of ‘atonement’ for ‘original sin’. This.
The computers in which memes live are human brains.
An organism is the physical unit associated with one single life cycle. Replicators that gang up in multicellular organisms achieve a regularly recycling life history, and complex adaptations to aid their preservation, as they progress through evolutionary time.
So far, so vindictive: par for the Old Testament course. New Testament theology adds a new injustice, topped off by a new sadomasochism whose viciousness even the Old Testament barely exceeds. It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol, often worn around the neck. Lenny.
Religion can endanger the life of the pious individual, as well as the lives of others.
Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist’s metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe.
Returning to humanity’s need for comfort, it is, of course, real, but isn’t there something childish in the belief that the universe owes us comfort, as of right?
The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn’t make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention.
Parsimony is always in the forefront of a scientist’s mind when choosing between theories, but it isn’t always obvious how to judge it.
Putting these three things together we arrive at our own ‘central theorem’ of the extended phenotype: An animal’s behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes ‘for’ that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.
Atheists need to raise their own consciousness of the anomaly: religious opinion is the one kind of parental opinion that – by almost universal consent – can be fastened upon children who are, in truth, too young to know what their opinion really is. There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.
These beliefs contradict each other, so they can’t be all right.
Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love.
Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence.
I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, or life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase ‘Christian child’ or ‘Muslim child’ should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.
Far from pointing to a designer, the illusion of design in the living world is explained with far greater economy and with devastating elegance by Darwinian natural selection.
A scientific theorum has not been – cannot be – proved in the way a mathematical theorem is proved.
Replicator selection is the process by which some replicators survive at the expense of other replicators. Vehicle selection is the process by which some vehicles are more successful than other vehicles in ensuring the survival of their replicators.
Such work would never be done if scientists were satisfied with a lazy default such as ’intelligent design theory.
As many atheists have said better than me, the knowledge that we have only one life should make it all the more precious. The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.