What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented.
If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers. Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools: that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise.
No sane creator, setting out from scratch to design a flat-fish, would have conceived on his drawing board the absurd distortion of the head needed to bring both eyes round to one side.
Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men – above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends. – ALBERT EINSTEIN.
One of my pet peeves is the habit of labelling young children with the religion of their parents: ‘Catholic child’, ‘Protestant child’, ‘Muslim child’. Such phrases can be heard used of children too young to talk, let alone hold religious opinions. It seems to me as absurd as talking about a ‘Socialist child’ or ‘Conservative child’, and nobody would ever use a phrase like that. I don’t think we should talk about ‘atheist children’ either.
The American comedian Cathy Ladman observes that ‘All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.
Indeed, to claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its ever being explained.
Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria.
One way to express the answer is that it might happen by ‘chance’. But ‘chance’ is just a word expressing ignorance. It means ‘determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means’.
Many religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good.
It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.
Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity’s tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier – or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?
The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.
An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand. If.
Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case.
To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought denying skyhookery.
They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.
If I’d been born in ancient Greece, I’d worship Zeus and Aphrodite.
My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism.