Meet The Author: Richard Dawkins

LOL, thanks for that. This is the first comment and the best. You are a funny man.

and you are lacking of logic logik - u might know how to plugin your computer but you are not very skilled as a forums author - are you ?

you are a moron, stop spreading stupidity please. I wonder how can you plug in your computer?

@southpaugh~
Good, solid facts! One point, however....your argumants will gaine considarible influance if you take a momant to use your browser's spellcheck. ;~)

@monologue~
Didn't you hear him? He admitted that but said it was usually people with a bad reaction to his unwavering clarity who felt that way.

PS: Wait a minute. Is that a seal I heard in the background? It's Australia and it could be anything.

Childhood's tribal dogmas and the brain's imprinted patterns to accept guidance may get some later transference onto an 'in loco parentis' sacred agent in the form of religion. I've suspected this for a long time. Thanks, Rich.

Amazingly... I say this all the time in defense of the good professor:
Richard Dawkins isn't threatening, egotistical, caustic, bullying, shrill and/or pedantic! He's just very clear and many people are alergic to clarity!
(He acknowledged the same thing in the Q&A. without any coaching or prompting from me.)

I have to admit, he does lack that humility and openess that one would hope to find in a scientific mind.

He took a page out of his The Selfish Gene.

That's just silly and demonstrates a profound ignorance of the man's life. Charles Darwin was never religious though he often wrote in the religious sounding metaphor prevelent in his day. Everybody did that, even the most profound atheists of the day, among whom Darwin counted himself. The greatest friction between Darwin and his second cousin wife was the disparity between his lack of faith and her fervent belief. The release of Origin of Species was delayed for many years because he knew its release would cause a religious backlash in society, perhaps ruin his scientific career, and especially the effect it would have on his wife and their relationship. For all the apparent inclination for you to give authroity to superstition notwithstanding, you would likely preserve any stipling of credibility were you to have even basic facts straight about the icon you wish to claim as your own. Even were Darwin a man of god, his theory is independant of religious superstition and depends on observed, empirical and objective fact rather than traditional hearsay, myth and superstition which is the difference between science and religion. As time has passed, further research has proven his theoretical preditions true, confirmed his original theoretical premes and strengthened the accuracy of his scientific theory overall. Mistakenly using faith that Dawin did not possess to somehow magically demonstrate the superiority of faith in a sky god over scientific principles as an explaination of how the universe works is application of a logical fallacy, known as either an appeal to authority or an appeal to popularity, and proves nothing. Merely smoke and mirrors, diversion, sleight of hand.

Quite so pavel! Notice that in different regions the oldest religions, grown from tribal traditions, all have similar conclusions about things like humans conducting themselves by rules, and strong connections between the requirements and customs of life. All are very different and original in their conceptions about metaphysical questions like the origin of the universe and whether "higher beings" might exist. Customary tales like the Mahabharata try to connect all aspects of life from creation to individual birth and death and beyond. All parts of the world come up with their own tales, and as we see people's attachments to these differing fancies cause intense hate and conflict to arise. (Just one more meme-versus-meme all-out war for survival, you might say.)

But science makes no assumptions and promotes no dogmas or attachments to any fanciful idea. In science you can only chase a fruitless theory so far before it ceases to be rewarding. By contrast the socio-psychological rewards of religious self-identification strongly reinforce attachment to the ideological underpinnings. Regardless of whether someone has had a personally 'transcendent' or 'entheogenic' experience, they hold fast because everyone around them is also holding fast, and because of that human obstinacy that we are always right in our beliefs, even if we can't back them up. Human emotional attachment completely overrides reasoning, regardless of its object.

You and I perhaps see the irony, at least among Christians, because their teacher is portrayed as a total iconoclast who flouts the mindless religious rules and rituals of his day, and instructs his followers to seek the truth in themselves, always seek the truth and put yourself and your clinging last. To cut off even your "right hand" if it should hinder you in the process. He's telling people to shake off their attachment to ideology and blind custom. He's telling them to meditate (the "Lord's Prayer" is a fine mantra) which will help them overcome attachment and foster psychological resilience. He's telling them to stop trying to dialogue with God mano-a-mano, sit down and shut up because the spiritual stuff you're looking to take advantage of kids is all pre-linguistic! And he's telling them to turn the other cheek, love your neighbor, and all the things that foster both personal and global harmony. If more Christians actually followed Jesus's prescriptions they'd inevitably wake up enough to see that Science is just a tool to help us understand the universe we inhabit, and to choose the most advantageous course according to our wisdom. And they might see too that the Bible is a fine relic but often confounding, badly interpreted by their preacher, and that the truly uplifting stuff is out there. It's reality itself, the living moment, and you're filtering it through an old dusty book instead of being involved in it. Sad!

There's this parable - or koan if you will - about a farmer who goes away and leaves his fields in the care of his sons. Remember that one? The sons are morons. They're convinced initially that they know what's what and that they can manage the place, but it all goes to ruin. The old farmer returns and sees the sloppy mess these undisciplined fools have made of the place. The farm is your mind. The farmer is your deepest center of will and observation. The sons are the ineffectual and uninformed means of managing your mind - your interface with reality and yourself - that your moron culture and moron religions have provided you.

Now that the farmer is back, you who have not practiced and who have not developed your minds and educated yourselves about how to live and work with the reality we find before us... Your attachment to outmoded fanciful stories about how things might have come into being is extremely quaint, even in the eyes of Jesus. He and his contemporaries had the vision to see that religions get fat and lazy and stupid. The small groups who are fired up to meditate and seek, who really do the work, can't keep it together when they become large groups. Intimacy is lost. Local chapters of popular religions are a poor remedy because they are filled with lazy non-seekers who just get together in groups and assert that they "have the truth in hand!" Christianity therefore quickly descended into a cult about Jesus, rather than a basis for further development.

Historically, the destruction of the ancient Library at Alexandria by Christians is one of the greatest tragedies of our time, delaying by a thousand years many of the scientific developments we enjoy today. Imagine if the industrial age had occurred a thousand years ago, when the Human population was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Imagine if we had had a thousand extra years to consider the problems of overpopulation, climate change, habitat destruction, fossil fuels, and human health and welfare. Imagine if the Christian ethic of love thy neighbor had prevailed right along with it to the present day.

We are all of us very lucky to live in a secular society where we can all share in the common wealth of human ideas, ingenuity, insights, and imagination. Without the imaginative tales of Hinduism we might not recognize the deeper aspects of our nature when we come face to face with them. If not for the rigor and discipline of a Jonas Salk we might never have cured polio. If not for the humor of a George Carlin we might never have learned to laugh at ourselves.

Truly, any person who deeply needs to narrow themselves to a prehistoric Sinai Peninsula mindset is way too hung up on ideology, dogma, authoritarianism, and literalism. They need to seriously "let go and let God" when it comes to the One True Religion and realize the real truth is super subtle, and that's why your teachers ask you to practice so hard and keep seeking! You haven't got it yet!

Scott out.