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.
Richard Dawkins - God - Religion - Bible - Racism - Hate - Dictator - Christianity

I think the important thing to learn is that we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.
Richard Dawkins - God - Religion - Culture - Christianity - Islam - Marriage - Funeral - Belief - History

There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out.
Richard Dawkins - Belief - Stupid

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins - God - Religion - Belief - Atheism - History

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Richard Dawkins - Religion - Teaching - Understanding - Satisfaction - World

Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the "know-nothings", the "know-alls", and the "no-contests."
Richard Dawkins - Religion - Science - Criticism - Knowing

What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child.
Richard Dawkins - Life - Children

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.
Richard Dawkins - Religion - Christianity - Islam - Belief - Understanding - Survival - Crazy

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Richard Dawkins - Religion - Belief - Influential - Power - Truth - Lies

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 - Religion - Bible - Christianity - Belief - Atheism - Teaching - Education - Culture

Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it.
Richard Dawkins - God - Religion - Belief - Education - World - Life - Wrong

It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work.
Richard Dawkins - Darwinism - Facts

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
Richard Dawkins - Truth - Facts - Wrong - Possible

Faith is the great cop out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Richard Dawkins - Religion - Belief - Faith - Thinking - Facts