The Book [The Selfish Gene] propelled him into the spotlight and gave Dawkins a platform to speak out as a ferocious critic of religion. Beautiful Minds s2e3: Richard Dawkins, BBC 2012
Dawkins hit back against what he saw as the political hijacking of his work. ibid.
What I am against is the labelling of children with the religion of their parents ... I think it’s abusive to children to take a tiny child and say, You are a Christian child, or you are a Muslim child. Richard Dawkins, The Big Debate, 2008 BBC
The battle for evolution is just a skirmish in a larger war. A larger war for rationality, for scepticism, for critical thinking, for a rational scientific view. Richard Dawkins, with Dan Dennett & Sam Harris & Ayaan Hirsi Ali, GAC Melbourne 2012
What is the benefit to a religion of being so unpleasant? ibid.
It’s very unfortunate when you inadvertently find people agreeing with you who are the last people you would wish to agree with you. I mean, I despise Trump. I despise everything that he stands for. But it’s perfectly true that many people think that I ought to be on his side because he has these draconian, illiberal, horrible policies towards Muslims. I mean, trying to stop Muslims entering the country, what a horrible thing to do. What an impolite, unwise, illiberal, inhumane thing to do. And so I’m embarrassed if people on the Alt-Right agree with something that I say for the wrong reasons.
There’s not a great deal about religion in Science in the Soul. Most of what I have to say about that is in my earlier book The God Delusion, so I can rehearse that if you wish. To me, as a scientist, the main argument is a scientific one. I think that the hypothesis that the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence is a scientific hypothesis – it’s a bad hypothesis, it’s a false hypothesis – but it has to be judged on its scientific merits.
The universe would be a very different kind of universe if there was a supernatural creative intelligence in it than if there wasn’t. So much of my argument is a scientific argument. There is no positive reason to believe in anything supernatural. If you look at all the reasons that have been offered, none of them stand up, none of them hold water.
In the form of Darwinian evolution, we have a superb theory of why living things have come into being, why they are the way they are, why they look as though they’ve been designed – and they undoubtedly do look as though they’ve been designed. The illusion of design in living things is immensely powerful and it’s no wonder that until Darwin came along almost everybody believed that it was created by a supernatural intelligence.
But we now have Darwin, we now have Darwin and his successors. We now know how life came about. And the complexity and the beauty, the elegance and the illusion of design of life has always been by far the most powerful argument for the existence of supernatural gods and that is completely blown out of the water.
The secondary argument is whether religion has evil effects, whether religion has bad effects, and on balance I think it does. The real problem is that religious faith prides itself on not needing support. You can’t argue somebody out of their faith, they simply say. Richard Dawkins, 2 Flaws Plague Unscientific Belief, Youtube
Mormonism is possibly intelligently designed rather less intelligently. Richard Dawkins & Dan Dennett, In Conversation Oxford 2012, Dawkins
It’s no accident that religions around the world have used unison singing and chanting. ibid. Dennett
A number of social institutions depend on the ignorance of those that they exploit. ibid.
This easily maintained ignorance is the life-blood of religious solidarity. ibid.
Religion ... is unravelling itself at a great rate. ibid.
They manipulate the metaphors ... This ever-revising set of metaphors. ibid.
The fib of all fibs that you can’t be good without God. ibid.
They’ve always been lots of offshoots, religions have come and gone ... There’s probably been ten religions or a hundred religions that nobody has ever heard of for every one that we have any historical record of. ibid.
The fastest growing category in the world is no religion. ibid.