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"I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things."
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Exlpore more Belief quotes
"Whatever you believe in, is true " at least to you! The question is, "How positive and empowering is it, especially in the face of adversity?"
"One can win only if he believes himself to be a winner."
"Any thought sequence that minimizes anxiety would get reinforced over time. The sequence would be maintained during the person's development and would be provoked in contexts where refutation of the belief might occur. So, any kind of refutation of a person's religious beliefs makes the beliefs only stronger."
"If you don't believe,nothing ever happens at all."
"Belief is indeed psychologically important for the human mind of general population, but that belief should be nicely compatible with scientific reasoning, otherwise that belief turns into prejudice, which is never beneficial to the human life."
"Just as you first eat with your eyes, you also first desire things with your subconscious mind!"
"What millions believe is often just fairy tales for children! The fabrications of the past are ridiculously accepted as the holies of people! Glory lies in searching the truth not in believing the irrational legends!"
"I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again."
"Whatever may be the position of science, whatever may be the position of philosophy, as long as there is such a thing as death in the world, as long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, as long as the human heart sheds a drop of tear in weakness, there shall be a faith in God and divinity."
Explore more quotes by Richard Dawkins
"Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility."
"We wanted to be accepted by our fellows, especially the influential natural leaders among us; and the ethos of my peers was " until my last year at Oundle " anti-intellectual. You had to pretend to be working less hard than you actually were. Native ability was respected; hard work was not. It was the same on the sports field. Sportsmen were admired more than scholars in any case. But if you could achieve sporting brilliance without training, so much the better. Why is native ability more admired than hard graft? Shouldn't it be the other way around?"
"Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'."
"Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality " saying something like: 'It is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us.' Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true."
"When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine."
"Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever."
"One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all."
"The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. [I]t is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. [A] successful gene will be one that does well in the environments provided by these other genes that it is likely to meet in lots of different bodies."
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