I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack.

Richard Dawkins

Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Richard Dawkins

wisdom hope love

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, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Richard Dawkins

atheist religious god

Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.

Richard Dawkins

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The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat is surely, from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn't he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured?

Richard Dawkins

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Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Richard Dawkins

atheist education children

Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.

Richard Dawkins

building jumping evolution

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they are never going to be born. The number of people who could be here, in my place, out number the sand grains in the Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. The number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist... we are privileged to be alive and nd we should make the most of our time on this world.

Richard Dawkins

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Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well.

Richard Dawkins

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Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.

Richard Dawkins

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How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.

Richard Dawkins

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An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Richard Dawkins

atheist christian god

Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Richard Dawkins

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You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me; between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian?

Richard Dawkins

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Religion shows a pattern of heredity which I think is similar to genetic heredity. ... There are hundreds of different religious sects, and every religious person is loyal to just one of these. ... The overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one their parents belonged to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained-glass, the best music when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing compared to the matter of heredity.

Richard Dawkins

religious science thinking

It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.

Richard Dawkins

ideas son thinking

We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.

Richard Dawkins

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The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Richard Dawkins

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The less you think, the more you believe.

Richard Dawkins

doubt believe thinking

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

Richard Dawkins

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Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

Richard Dawkins

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