In George Bernard Shaw’s words, ‘The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
There is in every village a torch – the teacher: and an extinguisher – the clergyman. – VICTOR HUGO.
The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’.
There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence.
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.
Let’s get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Religion: Together we can find the cure.
Science is the poetry of reality.
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it...
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, ‘How could an organ so complex evolve?’ This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity.
The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.