The right to be Christian’ seems in this case to mean ‘the right to poke your nose into other people’s private lives’. The legal case in favour of discrimination against homosexuals is being mounted as a counter-suit against alleged religious discrimination! And the law seems to respect this. You can’t get away with saying, ‘If you try to stop me from insulting homosexuals it violates my freedom of prejudice.’ But you can get away with saying, ‘It violates my freedom of religion.
True warfare in which large rival armies fight to the death is known only in man and in social insects.
In terms of the analogy, suppose an ideally balanced crew would consist of four right-handers and four left-handers. Once again assume that the coach, unaware of this fact, selects blindly on ‘merit’. Now if the pool of candidates happens to be dominated by right-handers, any individual left-hander will tend to be at an advantage: he is likely to cause any boat in which he finds himself to win, and he will therefore appear to be a good oarsman.
That is not a Muslim child, but a child of Muslim parents. That child is too young to know whether it is a Muslim or not. There is no such thing as a Muslim child. There is no such thing as a Christian child.
There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of ‘diversity’ and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions.
You say you have experienced God directly? Well, some people have experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn’t impress you.
I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: ‘The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.
Smolin’s idea, expounded in The Life of the Cosmos, hinges.
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.