2.2
THE GOD DELUSION
RICHARD DAWKINS
(Clinton) Richard Dawkins (26 March 1941), was born in
British Kenya and moved to England when he was 8 years old. Halfway
through his Christian teenage years, he concluded that the theory of evolution alone was a better explanation for life's complexity,
and ceased believing in a god. Dawkins states: "The main residual
reason why I was religious was from being so impressed with the complexity of
life and feeling that it had to have a designer, and I think it was when I
realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out
from under the argument of design. And that left me with nothing".
As a biology researcher
under Nobel Prize-winning
ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, he received
his MA and Doctor of Philosophy.
He worked as a lecturer in zoology and became a great ethologist and an evolutionary
biologist. He became a prolific
writer bringing out books of repute one after another. Dawkins got his prominence with his first book The Selfish Gene in 1976. In The Selfish Gene Dawkins argues that natural
selection takes
place at the genetic rather than the species or individual level, as is often
assumed. Genes, he maintains, use the bodies of living things to further their
own survival. He is the one who coined and introduced the term meme in this
book, from the Greek word mimeme, meaning
“to imitate.” It later spawned an entire field of study called memetics.
In his The
God Delusion (2006),
Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist
and that religious faith is only a delusion.
Though many of his books are able to generate debates, asserting the supremacy
of science over religion, nothing matched
The God Delusion in creating more disputes and controversies. The book relentlessly points out the logical
fallacies in religious belief and ultimately concludes that the laws of
probability preclude the existence of an omnipotent creator.
Dawkins
argued, in his usual uncompromising fashion, that science and religion are
incompatible. He set up the Richard Dawkins
Foundation in
2006 to promote the cause of removing religion from science. He was elected
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and a Fellow
of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2001.
Dawkins is a
ferocious polemicist, a defender of reason and enemy of superstition. He
refused to accept religions on two aspects; one, religions are the birthplaces
for all confusions; and two, believers hold on to their faith even without any
basic proof for them. He feels the
greatest mistake is to believe something without any evidences or proofs.
According to him, all atheists should keep their heads high without any trace
of guilt since being anti-religious is because of a complete and free mind. Dawkins suggests that atheists should be proud, not
apologetic, stressing that atheism is evidence of a healthy, independent mind.
He is an outspoken atheist and a supporter of various atheist, secular, and
humanistic organisations, including Humanists UK and the Brights movement of
U.S.A..
Dawkins reiterates four
aspects of awakening in his book. They are:
1. Non-believers always lead
an intellectual life with discipline and utmost responsibility. Their minds are
always filled with happiness.
2. 'Creation' as told in
holy books is baseless; but evolutionary concepts and physical sciences and
their concepts are more meaningful.
3. Children are forcefully
brought into the religion of their parents. This makes the world for children
narrow and parochial.
4. Atheism is the result of
deep analytical thinking of the person. Hence non-believers should feel proud
of themselves.
BOOKS WRITTEN DAWKINS:
1. The Selfish Gene (1976)
2. The Extended Phenotype
(1982)
3. The Blind Watchmaker
(186)
4. River out of Eden (1995)
5. Climbing Mount
Improbable (1996)
6. Unweaving the Rainbow
(1998)
7. A Devil's Chaplain
(2003)
8. The Ancestor's Tale
(2004)
9. THE GOD DELUTION (2006)
10.
The Greater Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009)
11.
The Magic Reality: How We Know What's Really True (2011)
12.
An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist (2013)
13.
Brief Candle in he Dark: My Life in Science (2015)
14.
. Science in the Soul: Selected
Writings of a Passionate Rationalist (2017)
CHAPTER
1
A DEEPLY RELIGIOUS NON-BELIEVER
Robert M. Pirsig, author of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writes when one person suffers from
a delusion, it is called insanity; when many people suffer from a
delusion, it is called religion. (28)
I do not try to imagine a
personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the
world, insofar as it allows our inadequate to appreciate it.
-- Albert Einstein (31)
Some more quotes from
Einstein: “I am a deeply religious non-believer. This is somewhat new kind of
religion."
“The idea of a personal god
is quite alien to me and even naive." (36)
Even
in his life time Einstein was very crudely criticised. Like many common fables
yarned after the death of famous people, it was rumoured that Einstein came
back to Christian faith at the time of his death. Another baseless concoction!
Carl Sagan in his book Pale
Blue Dot, wrote: “How is it hardly any major religion has looked at
science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The universe
is much bigger than our Prophet said, grander, more subtle,
more elegant? Instead they say, “ No, no, no! My god is a
little God, and I want him to stay that way!” (33)
Douglas Adams says: “Religion
… has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or
whatever. What it means is, - “Here is an idea or a notion that you are not
allowed to say anything bad about; you are just not. ….. If
somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument
about it. But on the other hand if somebody says,’ I must not move a
light switch on a Saturday’, you say, I respect that." … We are
used to not challenging religious ideas but it is very interesting how much of
a roar it creates." (42)
Dawkins elaborately gives
the details of an incident that occurred in September 2005 in Denmark. A newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve
cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad. In the next three months serious
problems cropped up all the world over. News was spread that the newspaper was of
a governmental organ and in many distant countries, the Danish flag was burnt.
None knows how all those countries got the flags of Denmark. A bounty of one million was placed on
the head of the Danish cartoonist by a
Pakistani imam - by the say, where was that million going to come from? Further in addition to the twelve cartoons
another three more were added by zealous propagandists. Of these three, one was
a bearded man wearing a fake pig's snout held on with elastic. Later this was
turned out that this was an Associated Press photograph of a Frenchman entered
for a pig-squealing contest at a country fair in France. Banners carried by
protesters in Britain were saying: "Slay those who insult Islam",
"Europe you will pay", and "Behead those who insult Islam."
Fortunately, our political
leaders were on hand to remind us that Islam is a religion of peace and mercy.
If people wish to love a 7th century preacher more than their own families,
that's upto them, but nobody else is obliged to take it seriously …."
(46-49)
H.L.Mencken said: "We must respect the
other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we
respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. (50)
CHAPTER
2
THE GOD HYPOTHESIS
The religion of one age is the literary
entertainment of the next.
- RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The
God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all
fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control
freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic,
homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal,
pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-machistic, capriciously malevolent
bully.
Thomas
Jefferson was of a similar opinion, describing the God of Moses as “a being of
terrific character - cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust." (51)
Pope John Paul II created
more Saints than all his predecessors of the past several centuries put
together and he had a special affinity with the Virgin Mary. His polytheistic
hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination
attempt in Rome and attributed his survival to intervention Of Our Lady of
Fatima: “A maternal hand guided the bullet." One cannot help wondering why
she did not guide it to miss him altogether. (56)
The burden of proving the
existence of a God falls on the believers. This was demonstrated by Bertrand
Russel’s parable of the celestial teapot. “If I have to suggest that
between the Earth and Mars there is a China teapot revolving about the sun in
an elliptical Orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion. … But
if I had to go on to say that since my assertion cannot be proved, it is
intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it. … If
however the existence of such a teapot where affirmed in ancient books, taught
as a sacred truth every Sunday and instilled into the minds of children at
school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of
eccentricity and entitled the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in
an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time." (75)
How many liberalists have
read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for
adultery, for gathering sticks on the Sabbath and for cheeking your
parents?(81)
THE GREATER PRAYER
EXPERIMENT
Darwin’s cousin Francis
Galton was the first to analyse scientifically whether praying for people is
efficacious … but he found no statistical difference.
Then
Russell Stannard, one of Britain's 3 well known religious scientists went
on with an experiment with funding from Templeton Foundation to the tune of 2.4
million dollars. It was done on 3 batches of patients who underwent coronary
bypass surgery. The results reported in the American Heart Journal of April
2006 very clear cut there was no difference between those patients who have
prayed for and those who were not. Many funny interpretations were tried by the
believers. Many theologians like Swinburne disowned the study, only after
getting the negative results. (86-89)
CHAPTER 3
ARGUMENTS
FOR GOD’S
EXISTENCE
A
professorship of theology should have
no
place in our institution.
-- THOMAS JEFFERSON
The 5 proofs asserted by
Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century don't prove anything and are
easily exposed as vacuous.(101)
THE ARGUMENT FROM PERSONAL
EXPERIENCE
Many people believe in God
because they believe they have seen a vision of him or of an angel or a virgin
in blue with their own eyes.
I too personally have such
an experience. I lost my mother when I was just two or two and half years old.
No memories of her. Her cemetery was in our village. It was in a small piece of
land surrounded by tall palmyra trees and big and bushy tamarind trees. Even
till my teens when I happen to cross that area I used to have some odd feelings. Never dared to look
straight at the cemetery. But at the same time I could not want to miss it.
Some unknown feeling used to pervade me. Once, probably, I would have been when
I was ten years old. I was coming with one of my relatives. There was the usual
disturbance. Almost crossed the cemetery. Then without my own control, I looked
back at mother's cemetery. What I "saw" then is still in my memory so
fresh. There were two long white angels on the both the sides of amma's
cemetery, as tall as the palmyra. They were in a kneeling posture - as we see
in all catholic churches. It was for a fraction of a second. Even now I get jitters thinking of it.
After becoming a
non-believer I introspected and found a
very simple answer to that "apparition". It was the idea of heaven
and angels, my mother being protected here by two angels. It should have been
the picture I had in my deeper mind. So I saw what I wanted to see. The answer
looked so simple and satisfying to me.
THE ARGUMENT FROM SCRIPTURE
When
the gospels written many years after Jesus’ death nobody knew where he was born
but the old Testament prophecy (Micah 5 : 2)has led Jews to expect the
long awaited Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.(118)
David, if
he existed, lived nearly a thousand years before Mary and
Joseph. Why on earth would the Romans have required Joseph to go to the
city where a remote ancestor had lived a Millennium earlier? Robert Gillooly
shows how all essential features of the Jesus legend including the star in the
East, the virgin birth, the veneration of the baby by kings, the miracles, the
execution, the resurrection and the ascension are borrowed from other religions
already in existence in the Mediterranean and near East region.(119)
Do
the Christians never open the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why
don't they notice those glaring contradictions? Mathew traces Joseph’s
descent from King David via 28 intermediate generations, while Luke has
41 generations? (120)
The
only difference between The Da Vinci Code and the gospels is that the gospels
are ancient fiction while The Da Vinci Code is modern fiction.
Bertrand
Russell - The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve
in Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because
they are afraid of losing their incomes.(123)
The only website I could
find that claimed to list “Nobel Prize winning scientific Christians” came
up with six out of a total of several hundred scientific Nobelists. Of
these 6, it turned out that four were not Nobel Prize winners at all and at
least one to my certain knowledge is a non-believer who attends church for
purely social reasons. A more systematic study by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi 'found
that among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, as well as those in
literature, there was a remarkable degree of irreligiosity, as compared to the
populations they came from'. (126)
American scientists are
less religious than the American public generally and that the most
distinguished scientists are the least religious of all. What is
remarkable is a polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public
at large and atheism of the intellectual elite. (127)
CHAPTER 4
WHY THERE ALMOST
CERTAINLY IS NO GOD
Creationists eagerly seek a
gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap so
found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.(151)
This chapter has contained
the central argument of my book and so I shall summarise them as a series of 6
numbered points’
1.
One
of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the
complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2.
In
a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent
engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or wing, a spider or
a person.
3.
The
temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises
the larger problem of who designed the designer. … We need a ‘crane’, not a
Skyhook’ for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and
plausibility from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
4.
The
most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by
natural selection.
5.
We
don't have an equivalent crane for physics.
6.
But
even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one,
the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the
anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook
hypothesis of an intelligent designer.
If the argument of this
chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion - The God Hypothesis
- is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist. (189)
CHAPTER
5
THE
ROOTS OF RELIGION
Universal features of a
species demand a Darwinian explanation.
There is little evidence
that religious belief protects people from stress related diseases.(194)
Is religion a placebo that
prolongs life by reducing stress?(195)
Religion is a tool used by
the ruling class to subjugate the underclass. (197)
Biologists see religion as
a by-product of something else. … Religion does not have a direct
survival value of its own, but it is by-product of something else that does.
(Dawkins explains this with the example of animal behavior of moths.)(201)
“Don't paddle in the
crocodile-infested Limpopo” is a good advice but ”you must sacrifice
a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail” is at
best a waste of time and goats. Both admonitions sound equally trustworthy.
Both come from a respected source. … When the child grows up and has children
of her own, she will naturally pass the whole lot onto her own children -
nonsense as well as sense - using the same infectious gravitas of manner.(205)
The ethologist Robert
Hinde, in Why Gods Persist,, and the anthropologists Pascal Boyer, in Religion
Explained, and Scott Atran, in In Gods We Trust, have independently
promoted the general idea of religion as a by-product of normal psychological
depositions.(206)
Martin Luther was well
aware that reason was religion’s arch-enemy and he frequently warned of
its dangers: “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has." … Whoever
wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason. And gain:
Reason should be destroyed in all Christians."(221)
The Cargo cults of South
Pacific suggest sour lessons about the origin of religions generally and I’ll
set them out briefly here. First is the amazing speed with which a cult can
spring up.. Second is the speed with which the origination process covers its
tracks. … The third lesson springs from the independent emergence of similar
cults on different islands … Fourth, the cargo cults are similar not just to
each other but to older religions.(239)
CHAPTER 6
THE ROOTS OF MORALITY:
WHY ARE WE GOOD?
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 of our
own happiness depends.
…
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Many religious people find it
hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to
be good. (241)
What about the wrenching
compassion we feel when we see an orphaned child weeping, an old widow in
despair from loneliness, or an animal whimpering in pain?... Where does the
Good Samaritan in us come from?(246)
Hauser
and his colleagues adapted their moral experiments to the Kuna, a small Central
American tribe with little contact with Westerners and no formal religion.
Peter Singer, a moral philosopher also joined this work. The main
conclusion of Hauser and Singer’s study was that there is no statistically
significant difference between atheist and religious believers in making their
judgments. This is compatible with the view, which I had and many
others hold, that we do not need God in order to be a good - or
evil.(258)
THERE
IS NO GOD, WHY BE GOOD?
Einstein
said, “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and
hope for the award, then we are a sorry lot indeed."(259)
Do
we really need policing, weather by God or by each other - in order to
stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner? … A police
strike in Montreal was described in ‘The Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker. …
Majority of the population of Montreal presumably believed in God. Why didn't the fear of God restrain the
people when earthly policemen were temporarily removed from the scene? Wasn't
the Montreal strike a pretty good natural experiment to test the hypothesis
that belief in God makes us good? Or did the cynic H.L. Mencken get it right
when he tartly observed: "People say we need religion when what they
really mean is we need police."(261)
I
am not necessarily claiming that atheism increases morality, although humanism
- the ethical system that often goes with atheism - probably does. Another good
possibility is that atheism is correlated with some third factor, such as
higher education, intelligence or reflectiveness, which might counter-act
criminal injustice.
The
idea of Sam Harris in his Letter to Christian Nation is striking: Red
(Republican) states' are primarily red due to the overwhelming political
influence of conservative Christians. (Blue are the Democratic states.) Of the
25 cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62% are in blue states, and
38% are in red states. Of the 25 most dangerous cities, 76% are in red states,
and 24% are in blue states. In fact,
three of 5 most dangerus cities in the U.S.
are in pious state of Texas.(262)
Gregory
S.Paul, in the Journal of Religion and Society (2005) reached devastating
conclusion that 'higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate
with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early mortality, STD infection
rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies'.
Comment
of Dan Dennett on such of these studies in Breaking the Spell: "if there
is a significant positive relationship between moral behavior and religious
affiliation, practice or belief, it will soon be discovered, since so many
religious organizations are eager to confirm their traditional beliefs about
this scientifically."(263)
CHAPTER 7
THE
'GOOD' BOOK AND THE CHANGING
MORAL
ZEITGEIST*
Politics
has slain its thousands, but religion
has
slain its tens of thousands.
-- SEAN O'CASEY
(* zeitgeist = the spirit
characteristic of an age or generation)
Those who wish to base
their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood
it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture.(269)
The biblical story of
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is discussed by Dawkins. Gen 19:5;
19: 7-8; 31-36. If this
dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some
might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.
The story of Lot and the
Sodomites is eerily echoed in another chapter 19 of the book of Judges. Judges
19: 23,24; 19: 25,26.
Then the story of Abraham
is discussed: Genesis 12: 18,19; 20: 2-5
Abraham,
the "father" of all three monotheistic religions, stands as a role
model for all the believers. But the way he 'handled' his wife Sarah was
obnoxious. How he dealt with the Pharaoh and then the King of Gerar are very
unpleasant even to read. In both the stories it was Abraham who was making
continuously huge frauds; but his God punishes the kings and spares Abraham,
the culprit. That is God of Abraham's
justice! I used to wonder how people even after reading the Bible, name
their kids as Abraham or Sarah. And all these wicked stories and bad judgment
were in the 'word of God'!
God ordered Abraham to make
a burnt offering of his longed-for son. … His murdering knife was already in
his hand when an angel dramatically intervened with the news of the "last-minute
change of plan": God was only joking after all, 'tempting' Abraham, and
testing his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could
ever recover from such psychological trauma. This legend is one of the great
foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions. (275)
The book of Numbers tells
how God incited Moses to attack the Midianites. Moses was not a great role
model for modern moralists. (Numbers 31:18).
Chapter 25 in Numbers gives
another 'beautiful' story - a story of cruelty, guided by the God!(278)
The Bible story of Joshua's
destruction of Jericho and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is
morality indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of Poland or Saddam Hussein's
massacres of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs. The Bible may be an arresting and
poetic work of fiction, but is not the sort of book you could give your
children to form their morals.(280)
Do the people who hold up
the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of
what is actually written in it? (Numbers 15)(281)
IS THE NEW TESTMENT ANY
BETTER?
"If any man come to me
and hate not his father and mother and wife, and children … and his own life
also, he cannot be my disciple". Julia Sweeney, an American comedian,
asks: "Isn't that what cults do|? Get you to reject your family in order
to inculcate you?"
Christian focus is overwhelmingly
on sin sin sin sin sin sin sin. (285)
I have described atonement,
the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sado-masochistic and
repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous
familiarity which had dulled our objectivity. If God wanted to forgive our
sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment - thereby,
incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and
persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen
too? (287)
Religion is undoubtedly a
divisive force, and this is one of the main accusations leveled against
it.(294)
In India at the time of
partition, more than a million people were massacred in religious riots between
Hindus and Muslims (and fifteen million displaced from their homes). There was
nothing to divide them but religion. Salman Rushdie was moved by a more recent
bout of religious massacres in India to write an article called 'Religion, as
ever, is the poison in India's blood'.
What is there to respect in
any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around
the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results,
religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we've
done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to
do it again.
So India's problem turns
out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's
name.
The problem's name is God.
(295)
Religion amplifies and
exacerbates the damage in at least three ways:
Labelling of children - as
catholic children or protestant children …….
Segregated schools - in
group education separated from other religious children
Taboos against 'marrying
out'.(296)
Even if religion did no
other harm in itself, its wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness - its
deliberate and cultivated pandering to humanity's natural tendency to favour in
groups and shun out-groups - would be enough to make it a significant
force for evil in the world.(297)`
Zeitgeist progression is
more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good,
or to decide what is good.(309)
Hitler and Stalin were
atheists. What have you got to say about that? The question comes up after just
about every public lecture. It was with 2 assumptions: both are atheists; they
did their terrible things because they were atheists. … Even
if we accept that Hitler and Stalin shared atheism in common, they both also
had moustches, as does Saddam Hussein. So what?
… What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but
whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not
the smallest evidence that it does. (309)
Hitler was not really
religious but just cynically exploiting the religiosity of his audience. He may
have agreed with Napoleon, who said, 'Religion is excellent stuff for keeping
common people quiet', and with Seneca the Younger: 'Religion is regarded by the
common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful'.(313)
Religious wars really are
fought in the name of religions and they have been horribly frequent in histroy. I cannot think
of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism
Sam Harrison hits the
bullseye, in The End of Faith: The danger of religious faith is that it allows
otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them
holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious
propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must,
civilization is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even
now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought
something so tragically absurd could be possible?(316)
CHAPTER
8
WHAT'S WRONG WITH RELIGIONS?
WHY BE SO HOSTILE?
Religion has actually
convinced people that there's an invisible man - living in the sky - who
watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has
a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of
those ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning
and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and
choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time …. But He loves
you!
… GEORGE CARLIN
I, as a scientist, believe
(for example, evolution). I believe not because of reading a holy book but
because I have studied the evidence. It really is a very different matter.
Books about evolution are believed not because they are holy. They are believed
because they present overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence.
(319)
We believe in evolution
because the evidence supports it and we would abandon it overnight if new
evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalism would ever say anything
like that?(320)
I am hostile to
fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific
enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know
exciting things that are available to be known.(321)
One of the fiercest
penalties in the Old Testament is the one exacted for blasphemy. It is still in
force in certain countries. Section 295-C of the Pakistan penal code prescribes
the death penalty for this 'crime'. (324)
It is still an article of
the constitution of 'liberatred'
Afghanistan that the penalty for apostasy is death.(325)
The cause of all this
misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is of course religion itself and
it seems ludicrous to have to state such an obvious reality, the fact is that
the government and the media are doing a pretty good job of pretending that it
isn't so.
They have been brought up
from the cradle to have total and unquestioning faith.(344)
We accept the principle
that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious
faith.(345)
Christianity, just as much
as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue.(346)
If children were taught to
question and think through their belief, instead of being taught the superior
virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no
suicide bombers.
Faith can be very very
dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an
innocent child is a grievous wrong. (348)
CHAPTER
9
CHILDHOOD
ABUSE
AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION
There
is in every village a torch - the teacher;
and
an extinguisher - the clergyman.
…. VICTOR HUGO
Our society, including the
non-religious sector has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and
right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to
slap religious labels on them - 'Catholic child', Protestant child', 'Muslim
child' etc.(382)
CHAPTER
10
A MUCH NEEDED GAP
Does religion fill a much
needed gap? It is often said that there is God-shaped gap in the brain which
needs to be filled; we have psychological need for God - imaginary friend,
father, big brother, confessor, confidant - and the need has to be satisfied
whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap
that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art?
Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no
credence to other lives beyond the grave? A love of nature, or what the great
entomologist E.O.Wilson has called Biophilia? (389)
Perhaps even better;
imaginary friends - and imaginary gods - have the time and patience to devote
all their attention to the sufferer. (391)
Religion's power to console
doesn't make it true. (394)
Why don't religious people
talk like that when in the presence of the dying? Could it be that they don'r really believe
all that stuff they pretend to believe?(399)
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