* Richard Dawkins ~ A Glimpse

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

-- Richard Dawkins, in Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

Richard Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided Missiles" (September 15, 2001)

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.

Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all.

Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Richard Dawkins, The Humanist, Vol. 57, No. 1

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