Professor Richard Dawkins FRS is Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford and also a British Humanists Assn. Vice-President. His published works include The Selfish Gene, Unweaving the Rainbow, and many more, including the current bestseller - The God Delusion.
Richard Dawkins is currently the Most Famous Atheist in the world! He demands that scientists and other rational people stop waffling and accept the lack of evidence for religious claims and draw the obvious conclusions: there is no god, and religion is a pack of lies. Some quotes:
Let's be less respectful, or less automatically respectful, of somebody's view just because it's a religious view, let's treat somebody's religious views exactly the same way we treat their political views. If somebody says they're a Communist or a high Tory, and we wish to attack the fact that they're a high Tory or a Communist we don't feel any inhibition against doing so. But we do feel inhibition against attacking their religious views, and we shouldn't.
Religions do make claims about the universe - the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false.
The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion. If a physicist says God is another name for Planck's constant, or God is a superstring, we should take it as a picturesque metaphorical way of saying that the nature of superstrings or the value of Planck's constant is a profound mystery. It has obviously not the smallest connection with a being capable of forgiving sins, a being who might listen to prayers, who cares about whether or not the Sabbath begins at 5pm or 6pm, whether you wear a veil or have a bit of arm showing; and no connection whatever with a being capable of imposing a death penalty on His son to expiate the sins of the world before and after he was born.
The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The 'everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture." [from The Selfish Gene]
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