










1. Debate between Richard Dawkins and Madeline Bunting
Comment #126928 by Dad on February 14, 2008 at 2:07 pm
I think Ms Bunting's obfuscation spell was broken. Her clammer for the right words simply highlighted her confusion and lack of clarity. I could almost taste her moderate stance being broken down further as she questioned who the hell she was.
Home | Reason | Science | Columns | Newsletter | Calendar | The Richard Dawkins Foundation | Store | Archives | Contact | Forum | Website Banners | Tour Journal | Converts' Corner | Good, Bad, Ugly | Update Log
RichardDawkins.net : The Official Richard Dawkins Website
Email: contact@richarddawkins.net · Website Design by Josh Timonen / Upper Branch
Upper Branch Los Angeles Office: 1427 N La Brea, Suite A
LA, CA 90028 USA
Mailing List Signup: Enter your email
Go to The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
Richard Dawkins Articles | Comments | Tour Journal
Atheist Resources | Local Groups
Debate Points | Latest Responses
"Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning."
Albert Einstein
"I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so (see Ibn Warraq's excellent book, Why I am not a Muslim). Moonies and scientologists get a bad press, but they just haven't been around as long as the accepted religions. Theology is a respectable discipline when it studies such subjects as moral philosophy, the psychology of religious belief and, above all, biblical history and literature. Like Bertie Wooster, my knowledge of the Bible is above average. I seem to know Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon almost by heart. I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum - you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns. "
Richard Dawkins
"I want science to be taken seriously, because, after all, it's less ephemeral--it has a more eternal aspect than whatever the politics of the day might be, which, of course, gets the lead in the news."
Richard Dawkins
"Man is a Religious Animal. Man is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.... The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste."
Mark Twain
"The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive...but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born."
Mark Twain
"If this book doesn't change the world -- we're all screwed."
-Penn (Penn & Teller)
Over 1.5 million copies sold