Individuals in our ancestral past benefited from not religion per se but from psychological predispositions which could manifest themselves in the form of religion. ibid.
What I really want to do is to open people’s eyes to the elegance and the beauty of the world as seen through scientific eyes. And if religion is a casualty of that, so much the better. ibid.
More and more of us realise there is no God and yet religion still has a hold over us. I think ideas of saints and sinners, heaven and hell, still shape our thinking. I want to give you a scientific alternative. Richard Dawkins, Sex, Death and The Meaning of Life I: Sin, Channel 4 2012
What happens as we move on and leave religion behind? What will guide and inspire us in a world free from all gods? How can an atheist find meaning in life? ibid.
Do we really want to take our morals straight from the rather rigid rule book of an ancient desert tribe? ibid.
Christianity has always been peculiarly judgemental about what people get up to in the bedroom. ibid.
Does this preaching work? Do religious believers resist temptation better than anyone else? ibid.
Not only does religion fail to stop people sinning, it also forces them to live a lie. ibid.
Some people think that if we get rid of God and all religious values all that’s left is anarchy. But I want to show that there is order without religion. ibid.
Now we’ve left religion behind, we are getting better, more moral and kinder. ibid.
We suffer vicariously; it’s a very powerful emotion. ibid.
Science shows we humans are hard-wired to have empathy. ibid.
Goodness is natural to us; kindness is in our physiology. ibid.
What happens when you realise the dream is true? Richard Dawkins, Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life II
A more difficult question – What if anything can take God’s place? ibid.
Religion denies death is real. ibid.
Intuition rebels: we seem to want to believe that there’s some essence of ourselves, something that would not go across with all those molecules, something that a religious person might want to call a soul. ibid.
It’s so hard to shake off the religious way of death. We are programmed to believe in something like a soul. ibid.
Religion still dominates our thinking about death. ibid.
Our bodies are survival machines for genes. ibid.
Easily snuffed out in an instant, what is Life’s meaning? Richard Dawkins, Sex, Death and The Meaning of Life III
If there is no God, what is the Meaning of Life? ibid.
What’s the point? ibid.
We have less control over our lives than we might like to think. ibid.
Atheists may think they’ve given up God but it’s only human to cling to the idea that things happen for a reason. ibid.
Camus rejected religion as a source for the meaning he craved. ibid.
Surely meaning is found when we revolt against outrageous fortune. ibid.
Meaning is subjective, something personal. ibid.
As Dan Dennett noted in Breaking the Spell a bafflingly large number of intellectuals believe in belief, even though they lack religious conviction themselves. Richard Dawkins, lecture I’m an Atheist But ...
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. ibid.
What people believe on our planet depends so much on whereabouts on the planet they were born. Richard Dawkins, lecture 1: Waking Up in the Universe, 1991
Obviously what we believe is affected by our upbringing. But that doesn’t mean we can’t change our minds. We all have the right to see the evidence and re-evaluate our beliefs. Richard Dawkins, The Genius of Charles Darwin part III
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. Richard Dawkins
I want everybody to flinch whenever we hear a phrase such as ‘Catholic child’ or ‘Muslim child’. Speak of a ‘child of Catholic parents’ if you like; but if you hear anybody speak of a ‘Catholic child’, stop them and politely point out that children are too young to know where they stand on such issues. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion preface
Dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature (whether by evolution or design). ibid.
A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts – the non-religious included – is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other. ibid. p20
The other thing I cannot help remarking upon is the over-weaning confidence with which the religious assert minute details for which they neither have, nor could have, any evidence. ibid. p34
The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with his own superiority over rival gods and the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. ibid. p37
Or should we pick and choose among all the world’s religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? ... Why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion? ibid. p57
One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding. ibid. p126
Knowing that we are products of Darwinian evolution, we should ask what pressure or pressures exerted by natural selection originally favoured the impulse to religion. ibid. p163
It is time-consuming, energy-consuming, often as extravagantly ornate as the plumage of a bird of paradise. Religion can endanger the life of the pious individual, as well as the lives of others. Thousands of people have been tortured for their loyalty to a religion, persecuted by zealots for what is in many cases a scarcely distinguishable alternative faith. Religion devours resources sometimes on a massive scale. ibid. p164
Why do humans feast, kneel, genuflect, self-flagellate, nod maniacally towards a wall, crusade, or otherwise indulge in costly practices that can consume life and, in extreme cases, terminate it? ibid. p166
Is religion a placebo that prolongs life by reducing stress? ... If neuroscientists find a ‘god centre’ in the brain, Darwinian scientists like me will still want to understand the natural selection pressure that favoured it ... The Darwinian still wants to know why people are vulnerable to the charms of religion and therefore open to exploitation by priests, politicians and kings. ibid. pp167-169
The Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew suggests that Christianity survived by a form of group selection because it fostered the idea of in-group loyalty and in-group brotherly love. ibid. p170
Those of us who belittle group selection admit that in principle it can happen. The question is whether it amounts to a significant force in evolution. ibid. p170
I am one of an increasing number of biologists who see religion as a by-product of something else. ibid. p172
Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. ibid. p176
I made the comparison between falling in love and religion in 1993, when I noted that the symptoms of an individual infected by religion ‘may be startlingly reminiscent of those more ordinarily associated with sexual love’. ibid. p186
An anthropological survey such as Frazer’s Golden Bough impresses us with the diversity of irrational human beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution. ibid. p188
Modern morality, wherever else it comes from, does not come from the Bible. Apologists cannot get away with claiming that religion provides them with some sort of inside track to defining what is good and what is bad – a privileged source unavailable to atheists. ibid. pp246-247
Religion is a label of in-group/out-group enmity and vendetta, not necessarily worse than other labels such as skin colour, language or preferred football team, but often available when other labels are not. ibid. p259
Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. ibid. p286
Such absolutism nearly always result from strong religious faith, and it constitutes a major reason for suggesting that religion can be a force for evil in the world. ibid. p286
The same tendency to glory in the quaintness of ethnic religious habits, and to justify cruelties in their name, crops up again and again. ibid. p328