The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Houghton Mifflin, 2006, paperback
Richard Dawkins
"We are all atheists about most of
the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go
one god further."
p19
When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal force,
the truth does not necessarily lie midway between them. It is
possible for one side to be simply wrong.
p19
Kurt Wise
If all the evidence in the universe turns
against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would
still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems
to indicate.
p19
If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism,
I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change
my mind. As things stand, all available evidence evolution. It
is for this reason and this reason alone that I argue for evolution
with a passion that matches the passion of those who argue against
it. My passion is based on evidence. Theirs, flying in the face
of evidence as it does, is truly fundamentalist."
p22
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.
p23
Imagine a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers,
no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot,
no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim
massacres, no persecution of jews as 'Christ-killers', no Northern
Ireland 'troubles', no 'honour killings', no shiny-suited bouffant-haired
televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money. Imagine
no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of
blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing
an inch of it.
p25
If you are religious at all it is overwhelmingly probable that
your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas
and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full
well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in
Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.
p26
A Gallup poll taken in 1999 asked Americans whether they would
vote for an otherwise well-qualified person who was a woman (95
per cent would), Roman Catholic (94 per cent would), Jew (92 per
cent), black (92 per cent), Mormon (79 per cent), homosexual.
(79 per cent) atheist (49 per cent).
p26
John Stuart Mill
The world would be astonished if it knew
how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most
distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue,
are complete skeptics in religion.'
p27
Phillip E. Johnson
Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation
from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher
than itself?
p28
Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
When one person suffers from a delusion,
it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion
it is called Religion.
p31
Albert Einstein
I don't try to imagine a personal God;
it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar
as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
p32
Charles Darwin
From the war of nature, from famine and
death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving,
namely, the production of the higher "animals, directly follows.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers,
having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to
the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms
most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
p32
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
How is it that hardly any major religion
has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought!
The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more
subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is
a little god, and I want him to stay that way? A religion, old
or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed
by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence
and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
p33
Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory
Some people have views of God that are
so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find
God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that 'God is
the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature' or 'God is the universe?
Of course, like any other word, the word 'God' can be given any
meaning we like. If you want to say that 'God is energy then you
can find God in a lump of coal.
p36
Albert Einstein
I do not believe in a personal God...
If something is in me which can be called religious then it is
the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far
as our science can reveal it.
p39
A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition
to his main work of creating the universe in the first place,
is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of
his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity
is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers; forgives
or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing miracles;
frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them (or
even think of doing them). A deist, too, believes in a supernatural
intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting
up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist
God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific
interest in human affairs. Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural
God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym
for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs
its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does
not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions,
does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious
miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God
is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's
metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe...
p40
Albert Einstein
To sense that behind anything that can
be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp
and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and
as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I
am religious ... But I prefer not to call myself religious because
it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for
the vast majority of people, 'religion' implies 'supernatural'."
p40
Carl Sagan
"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?"
p42
Douglas Adams, Cambridge
"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...'"
p43
By far the easiest grounds for gaining conscientious objector
status in wartime are religious. You can be a brilliant moral
philosopher with a J prize-winning doctoral thesis expounding
the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board
evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you
can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail
through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate
you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.
p45
Salman Rushdie, in The New Statesman, 1988
"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'".
p50
H. L. Mencken
'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.'
p51
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The religion of one age is the literary
entertainment of the next.
p51
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.
p51
Thomas Jefferson
"[God is] a being of terrific character
- cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust."
p52
the God Hypothesis
There exists a superhuman, supernatural
intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe
and everything in it, including us.
p55
Thomas Jefferson
"Ridicule is the only weapon which
can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be
distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had
a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of
the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.'
p58
Gore Vidal
The great unmentionable evil at the center
of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text
known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved
- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions.
They are, literally, patriarchal - God is the Omnipotent Father
- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries
afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
p60
Senator Barry Goldwater in 1981
There is no position on which people are
so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful
ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah,
or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful
weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly.
The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are
not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to
force government leaders into following their position 100 percent.
If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral
issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or
votes or both... I will fight them every step of the way if they
try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the
name of conservatism."
p61
the terms of a treaty with Tripoli drafted in 1796 under George
Washington and signed by John Adams in 1797
... the Government of the United States
of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion...
p64
James Madison
During almost fifteen centuries has the
legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been
its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in
the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition,
bigotry and persecution.
p65
John Adams
How has it happened that millions of fables,
tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian
revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever
existed?'
p65
George Bush Senior to journalist Robert Sherman
I don't know that atheists should be considered
as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one
nation under God.
p68
Jawaharlal Nehru
The spectacle of what is called religion,
or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has
filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished
to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand
for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition,
exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.
p74
Bertrand Russell
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.
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is
a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit,
nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were
careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even
by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say
that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable
presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should
rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence
of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the
sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children
at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become
a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions
of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor
in an earlier time.
p82
God is not limited by the laws of nature;
he makes them and he can change or suspend them - if he chooses.
p88
Richard Swinburne one of Britain's leading theologians
My suffering provides me with the opportunity
to show courage and patience. It provides you with the opportunity
to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering. And it provides
society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest
a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular
kind of suffering... Although a good God regrets our suffering,
his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience,
sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character. Some
people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people
badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others.
Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious
choices about the sort of person they are to be. For other people,
illness is not so valuable.
p98
Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic.
p113
Sam Harris in The End of Faith
We have names for people who have many
beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their
beliefs are extremely common we call them 'religious'; otherwise,
they are likely to be called 'mad', 'psychotic' or 'delusional'
. . . Clearly there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely
an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society
to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts,
while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he
is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code
on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not
generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.
p123
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.
p123
Bertrand Russell
The immense majority of intellectually
eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion, but they conceal
the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.
p126
A study in the leading journal Nature by Larson and Witham in
1998 showed that of those American scientists considered eminent
enough by their peers to have been elected to the National Academy
of Sciences (equivalent to being a Fellow of the Royal Society
in Britain) only about 7 per cent believe in a personal God."
This overwhelming preponderance of atheists is almost the exact
opposite of the profile of the American population at large, of
whom more than 90 per cent are believers in some sort of supernatural
being.
p130
The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal reckoned that, however
long the odds against God's existence might be, there is an even
larger asymmetry in the penalty for guessing wrong. You'd better
believe in God, because if you are right you stand to gain eternal
bliss and if you are wrong it won't make any difference anyway.
On the other hand, if you don't believe in God and you turn out
to be wrong you get eternal damnation, whereas if you are right
it makes no difference. On the face of it the decision is a no-brainer.
Believe in God.
p131
Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found
himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not
believed in him.
"Not enough evidence, God, not enough
evidence"
p131
Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God
exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better,
fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on
his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping
him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc..
p137
Thomas Jefferson
The priests of the different religious
sects... dread the advance of science as witches do the approach
of daylight...
p161
a blogger - commenting on an article on intelligent design by
American geneticist Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins in the Guardian
newspaper
Why is God considered an explanation for
anything? It's not - it's a failure to explain, a shrug of the
shoulders, an 'I dunno' dressed up in spirituality and ritual.
If someone credits something to God, generally what it means is
that they haven't a clue, so they're attributing it to an unreachable,
unknowable sky-fairy...
p194
Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks
some version of the time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking
rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.
Some educated individuals may have abandoned religion, but all
were brought up in a religious culture from which they usually
had to make a conscious decision to depart. The old Northern Ireland
joke, 'Yes, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?',
is spiked with bitter truth. Religious behaviour can be called
a human universal in the same way as heterosexual behaviour can.
Both generalizations allow individual exceptions, but all those
exceptions understand only too well the rule from which they have
departed. Universal features of a species demand a Darwinian explanation.
Obviously, there is no difficulty in explaining
the Darwinian advantage of sexual behaviour. It is about making
babies, even on those occasions where contraception or homosexuality
seems to belie it. But what about religious behaviour? Why do
humans fast, kneel, genuflect, self-flagellate, nod maniacally
towards a wall, crusade, or otherwise indulge in costly practices
~ at can consume life and, in extreme cases, terminate it?
p195
George Bernard Shaw
The fact that a believer is happier than
a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken
man is happier than a sober one.
p195
American comedian Cathy Ladman
All religions are the same: religion is
basically guilt, with different holidays?
p206
The Jesuit boast
Give me the child for his first seven
years, and I'll give you the man.
p206
James Dobson, founder of 'Focus on the Family'
Those who control what young people are
taught, and what they experience - what they see, hear, think,
and believe - will determine the future course for the nation.
p222
Oscar Wilde
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply
the opinion that has survived.
p261
H.L. Mencken
People say need religion when what they
really mean is we need police.
p263
Gregory S. Paul in the Journal of Religion and Society, 2005
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.
p266
Spanish film director Luis Bunuel
God and Country are an unbeatable team;
they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.
p267
During World War I, in Britain, women handed out white feathers
to young men not in uniform
Oh, we don't want to lose you, but we
think you ought to go,
For your King and your country both need you so.
p268
Sean O'Casey
Politics has slain its thousands, but
religion has slain its tens of thousands.
p269
A frighteningly large number of people still do take their scriptures,
including the story of Noah, literally. According to Gallup, they
include approximately 50 per cent of the US electorate.
p293
anthropologist John Hartung
The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality,
complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups,
and world domination.
p294
Religion is undoubtedly a divisive force, and this is one of the
main accusations levelled against it. But it is frequently and
rightly said that wars, and feuds between religious groups or
sects, are seldom actually about theological disagreements. When
an Ulster Protestant paramilitary murders a Catholic, he is not
muttering to himself, 'Take that, transubstantiationist, mariolatrous,
incense-reeking bastard!' He is much more likely to be avenging
the death of another Protestant killed by another Catholic, perhaps
in the course of a sustained transgenerational vendetta. Religion
is a label of in-group/out-group enmity and vendetta, not necessarily
worse than other labels such as skin colour, language or preferred
football team, but often available when other labels are not.
Yes, of course the troubles in Northern
Ireland are political. There really has been economic and political
oppression of one group by another, and it goes back centuries.
There really are genuine grievances and injustices, and these
seem to have little to do with religion; except that - and this
is important and widely overlooked - without religion there would
be no labels by which to decide whom to oppress and whom to avenge.
And the real problem in Northern Ireland is that the labels are
inherited down many generations. Catholics, whose parents, grandparents
and great-grandparents went to Catholic schools, send their children
to Catholic schools. Protestants, whose parents, grandparents
and great-grandparents went to Protestant schools, send their
children to Protestant schools. The two sets of people have the
same skin colour, they speak the same language, they enjoy the
same things, but they might as well belong to different species,
so deep is the historic divide. And without religion, and religiously
segregated education, the divide simply would not be there. The
warring tribes would have intermarried and long since dissolved
into each other. From Kosovo to Palestine, from Iraq to Sudan,
from Ulster to the Indian sub-continent, look carefully at any
region of the world where you find intractable enmity and violence
between rival groups today. I cannot guarantee that you'll find
religions as the dominant labels for in-groups and out-groups.
But it's a good bet.
In India at the time of partition, more
than a million people were massacred in religious riots between
Hindus and Muslims (and fifteen million displaced from their homes).
There were no badges other than religious ones with which to label
whom to kill. Ultimately, there was nothing to divide them but
religion.
p295
Salman Rushdie in an article - "Religion, as ever, is the
poison in India's blood"
What is there to respect in any of this,
or in any the crimes now being committed almost daily around the
world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results,
religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them!
And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that
results makes it easier to do it again.
So India's problem turns out to be the
world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's
name.
The problem's name is God.
p297
Sociologists have done statistical surveys of religious homogamy
(marrying somebody of the same religion) and heterogamy (marrying
somebody of a different religion). Norval D. Glenn, of the University
of Texas at Austin, gathered a number of such studies up to 1978
and analysed them together. He concluded that there is a significant
tendency towards religious homogamy in Christians (Protestants
marry Protestants, and Catholics, and this goes beyond the ordinary
'boy next door effect'), but that it is especially marked among
Jews. Out of a total sample of 6,021 married respondents to the
questionnaire, 140 called themselves Jews and, of these, 85.7
per cent married Jews. This is hugely greater than the randomly
expected percentage of homogamous marriages. And of course it
will not come as news to anybody. Observant Jews are strongly
discouraged from 'marrying out', and the taboo shows itself in
Jewish jokes about mothers warning their boys about blonde shiksas
lying in wait to entrap them. Here are typical statements by three
American rabbis:
'I refuse to officiate at interfaith marriages.'
'I officiate when couples state their
intention to raise children as Jews.'
'I officiate if couples agree to premarital
counselling.'
Rabbis who will agree to officiate together
with a Christian priest are rare, and much in demand.
Even if religion did no other harm in
itself, its wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness - its deliberate
and cultivated pandering to humanity's natural tendency to favour
in-groups and shun out-groups - would be enough to make it a significant
force for evil in the world.
p298
New Ten Commandments - from an atheist website
* Do not do to others what you would not
want them to do to you.
* In all things, strive to cause no harm.
* Treat your fellow human beings, your
fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty,
faithfulness and respect.
* Do not overlook evil or shrink from
administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing
freely admitted and honestly regretted.
* Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
* Always seek to be learning something
new.
* Test all things; always check your ideas
against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief
if it does not conform to them.
* Never seek to censor or cut yourself
off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree
with you.
* Form independent opinions on the basis
of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be
led blindly by others.
* Question everything.
p302
Abraham Lincoln in a debate with Stephen A Douglas in 1858
I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever
have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and
political equality of the white and black races; that I am not,
nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes,
nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with
white people; and I will say, in addition to this, that there
is a physical difference between the white and black races which
I believe will forever forbid the two races living
together on terms of social and political
equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do
remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior,
and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior
position assigned to the white race."'
p310
Adolf Hitler, 1933
We were convinced that the people need
and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight
against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few
theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.
p311
Adolf Hitler, 1941, told his adjutant General Gerhard Engel
I shall remain a Catholic for ever.
p311
John Toland - "Adolf Hitler The Definitive
Biography"
Still a member in good standing of the
Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, [Hitler]
carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of
god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge
of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand
of god - so long as it was done impersonally, without cruelty.
p313
Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, 1925
Hence today I believe that I am acting
in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending
myself against the Jew, lam fighting for the work of the Lord.
p313
Adolf Hitler in a speech in the Reichstag in 1938
The reason why the ancient world was so
pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great
scourges: the pox and Christianity.
p313
Napoleon
Religion is excellent stuff for keeping
common people quiet.
p313
Seneca the Younger
Religion is regarded by the common people
as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
p316
Religious wars really are fought in the name of religion, and
they have been horribly frequent in history. I cannot think of
any war that has been fought in the name of atheism. Why should
it? A war might be motivated by economic greed, by political ambition,
by ethnic or racial prejudice, by deep grievance or revenge, or
by patriotic belief in the destiny of a nation. Even more plausible
as a motive for war is an unshakeable faith that one's own religion
is the only true one, reinforced by a holy book that explicitly
condemns all heretics and followers of rival religions to death,
and explicitly promises that the soldiers of God will go straight
to a martyrs' heaven.
p316
Sam Harris in The End of Faith
The danger of religious faith is that
it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of
madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of
children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified
in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged
by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves
over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically
absurd could be possible?
p317
George Carlin
Religion has actually convinced people
that there's an invisible man - living in the sky - who watches
everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible
man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.
And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place,
full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where
he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream
and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time... But He loves
you!
p319
Books about evolution are believed not because they are holy.
They are believed because they present overwhelming quantities
of mutually buttressed evidence. In principle, any reader can
go and check that evidence. When a science book is wrong, somebody
eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent
books. That conspicuously doesn't happen with holy books.
p326
Ann Coulter
We should invade [Muslim] countries, kill
their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.
p326
Congressman Bob Dornan
Don't use the word "gay" unless
it's an acronym for "Got Aids Yet?
p326
General William G. Boykin
George Bush was not elected by a majority
of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God.
p329
Human embryos are examples of human life. Therefore, ~absolutist
religious lights, abortion is simply wrong: fully fledged murder.
I am not sure what to make of my admittedly anecdotal observation
that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic
life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking
adult life. to be fair, this does not, as a rule, apply to Roman
Catholics, who are among the most vociferous opponents of abortion.)The
born-again George W. Bush, however) is typical of today's religious
ascendancy. He, and they, are stalwart defenders of human life,
as long as it is embryonic life (or terminally ill life) - even
to the point of preventing medical research that would certainly
save many lives."' The obvious ground for opposing the death
penalty is respect for human life. Since 1976, when the Supreme
Court reversed the ban on the death penalty, Texas has been responsible
for more than one-third of all executions in all fifty states
of the Union. And Bush presided over more executions in Texas
than any other governor in the state's history, averaging one
death every nine days.
p330
Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue - to abortion doctors
When I, or people like me, are running
the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will
try you, and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will
make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and
executed.'
p330
Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue - to his followers
I want you to just let a wave of intolerance
wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you.
Yes, hate is good ... Our goal is a Christian nation. We have
a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country.
We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism.
Our goal must be simple. We must have
a Christian nation built on God's law, on the Ten Commandments.
No apologies.
p347
Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification
and brooks no argument.
p348
Victor Hugo
There is in every village a torch - the
teacher; and an extinguisher - the clergyman.
Richard
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