Select Quotes
Preface To The Paperback Edition
There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents. – Page 18
It is impossible to overstress the difference between such a passionate commitment to biblical fundamentals and the true scientist’s equally passionate commitment to evidence. – Page 19
‘Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.’ – Page 20
I suspect that for many people the main reason they cling to religion is not that it is consoling, but that they have been let down by our educational system and don’t realize that non-belief is even an option. – Page 22
Preface
‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.’ – Page 28
A Deeply Religious Non-Believer
If you want to say that ‘God is energy,’ then you can find God in a lump of coal. – Page 33
A New York rabbi said: ‘Einstein is unquestionably a great scientist, but his religious views are diametrically opposed to Judaism.’ ‘But’? ‘But’? Why not ‘and’? – Page 38
The one thing all his theistic critics got right was that Einstein was not one of them. – Page 39
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism. – Page 40
Carl Sagan put it well: ‘ … if by “God” one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying … it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.’ – Page 40
A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts—the non-religious included—is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other. – Page 42
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’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not?—because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. 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 mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’. – Page 42
The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’. – Page 45
You can’t get away with saying, ‘If you try to stop me from insulting homosexuals it violates my freedom of prejudice.’ But you can get away with saying, ‘It violates my freedom of religion.’ What, when you think about it, is the difference? Yet again, religion trumps all. – Page 46
As 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.’ – Page 50
The God Hypothesis
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. – Page 51
Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. – Page 55
What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented. – Page 56
Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. – Page 57
To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. – Page 63
I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence. – Page 63
Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Lighthouses are more useful than churches.’ – Page 64
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. – Page 74
I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further. – Page 77
Why shouldn’t we comment on God, as scientists? And why isn’t Russell’s teapot, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, equally immune from scientific scepticism? – Page 78
we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion? – Page 81
a universe with a supernaturally intelligent creator is a very different kind of universe from one without. – Page 82
Swinburne lets fall his gem: ‘There is quite a lot of evidence anyway of God’s existence, and too much might not be good for us.’ Too much might not be good for us! Read it again. Too much evidence might not be good for us. – Page 89
As Arthur C. Clarke put it, in his Third Law: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them. – Page 98
Arguments For God’S Existence
Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind? – Page 101
You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. – Page 102
If there is a logical argument linking the existence of great art to the existence of God, it is not spelled out by its proponents. It is simply assumed to be self-evident, which it most certainly is not. – Page 111
David Hume’s pithy test for a miracle comes irresistibly to mind: ‘No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.’ – Page 116
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. – Page 123
What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite. – Page 127
Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. – Page 130
Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they’d like to be true. – Page 135
Why There Almost Certainly Is No God
Atkins succeeds in reducing the amount of work the lazy God has to do until he finally ends up doing nothing at all: he might as well not bother to exist. – Page 144
Creationist ‘logic’ is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. – Page 146
one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding. – Page 152
Predators seem beautifully ‘designed’ to catch prey animals, while the prey animals seem equally beautifully ‘designed’ to escape them. Whose side is God on? 66 – Page 161
‘its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive him-self’. – Page 183
But think about why it is impolite to ask such direct, factual questions of religious people today. It is because it is embarrassing! But it is the answer that is embarrassing, if it is yes. – Page 187
The Roots Of Religion
Dan Dennett reminds us that the common cold is universal to all human peoples in much the same way as religion is, yet we would not want to suggest that colds benefit us. – Page 192
‘Tread softly, because you tread on my memes’. – Page 193
All religious beliefs seem weird to those not brought up in them. – Page 207
The idea of immortality itself survives and spreads because it caters to wishful thinking. And wishful thinking counts, because human psychology has a near-universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire – Page 221
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.—OSCAR WILDE – Page 222
The Roots Of Morality: Why Are We Good?
From the present point of view, the interesting thing is that most people come to the same decisions when faced with these dilemmas, and their agreement over the decisions themselves is stronger than their ability to articulate their reasons. This is what we should expect if we have a moral sense which is built into our brains, like our sexual instinct or our fear of heights or, as Hauser himself prefers to say, like our capacity for language (the details vary from culture to culture, but the underlying deep structure of grammar is universal). – Page 255
‘Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought.’ – Page 259
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.’ – Page 261
‘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’. – Page 263
As the distinguished Spanish film director Luis Buñuel said, ‘God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.’ – Page 266
The ‘Good’ Book And The Changing Moral Zeitgeist
Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its tens of thousands.—SEAN O’CASEY – Page 268
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. – Page 268
By what criterion do you decide which passages are symbolic, which literal? – Page 280
As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, ‘Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.’ – Page 283
Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something similar: ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’ – Page 283
The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty, and rape. Many ancient works do that—The Iliad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling the Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their lives. And it is, by far, the world’s all-time best seller. – Page 293
What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God. – Page 295
Seneca the Younger: ‘Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.’ – Page 313
cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism. – Page 316
What’S Wrong With Religion? Why Be So Hostile?
am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement. – Page 318
A certain kind of religious mind cannot see the moral difference between killing a microscopic cluster of cells on the one hand, and killing a full-grown doctor on the other. – Page 333
society would descend into a terrible anarchy if everybody invoked personal conviction in order to take the law into their own hands, rather than abiding by the law of the land. – Page 334
The cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is of course religion itself, and if 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. – Page 343
The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism—as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. – Page 345
Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ So did Bertrand Russell: ‘Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.’ – Page 345
As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers. – Page 345
The teachings of ‘moderate’ religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism. – Page 346
the Koran is like a pick-and-mix selection. If you want peace, you can find peaceable verses. If you want war, you can find bellicose verses.’ – Page 347
Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. – Page 347
Childhood, Abuse And The Escape From Religion
The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories. – Page 355
horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place. – Page 356
Clare and Shaquille and their fellows were not being educated. They were being let down by their school, and their school principal was abusing, not their bodies, but their minds. – Page 379
Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase ‘Christian child’ or ‘Muslim child’ should grate like fingernails on a blackboard. – Page 381
‘To present all faiths as equally valid is wrong. Everybody is entitled to think their faith is superior to others, be they Hindus, Jews, Muslims or Christians—otherwise what’s the point in having faith?’ 151 What indeed? And what transparent nonsense this is! These faiths are mutually incompatible. – Page 382
A Much Needed Gap?
Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true. – Page 394
It is amazing how many people seemingly cannot tell the difference between ‘X is true’ and ‘It is desirable that people should believe that X is true’. Or maybe they don’t really fall for this logical error, but simply rate truth as unimportant compared with human feelings. – Page 395
Mark Twain’s dismissal of the fear of death is another: ‘I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.’ – Page 396
Emily Dickinson said, That it will never come again Is what makes life so sweet. – Page 405
At the end of a famous essay on ‘Possible Worlds’, the great biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote, ‘Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose . – Page 408
The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising—or would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process. – Page 411
‘Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?’ – Page 411