Darrel Ray Quotes

• Religious people use 10% more pornography than secular people. The biggest consumers of pornography are Utah and Mississippi. All that religious preaching does no good.

  Darrel Ray

  Religious, Utah, People

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• All religions have something to say about sex, and it rarely coincides with scientific knowledge of sex and sexuality.

  Darrel Ray

  Sex, Sexuality, Scientific Knowledge

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• Once infected, the individual [infected with a god virus] cannot detect major contradictions in his beliefs and behavior. Belief systems become self-evident to him, and no amount of logical discourse will move him from his belief. If a Mormon and Catholic were to debate the merits of their respective religions, neither could see his own inconsistencies and logical fallacies, but would see the other's quite clearly.

  Darrel Ray

  Moving, Self, Catholic

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• Theology has not advanced an inch in the last 1,000 years. How much respect does a profession deserve if it cannot add to the knowledge and understanding of man?

  Darrel Ray

  Men, Years, Understanding

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• Religion has the capacity to silence critical thinking and create blindness in entire groups of people. It can infect the minds of followers so completely as to allow the most egregious sexual acts against children and others to go unchallenged for centuries.

  Darrel Ray

  Children, Thinking, People

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• We acquire both the language and religious concepts from our immediate culture – at the same time. A child cannot discriminate between useful survival information and the emotional and psychological manipulations of religion. Once infected, these ideas are deeply embedded and almost impossible to change.

  Darrel Ray

  Religious, Children, Emotional

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• Education is the key to perpetuation of the [god] virus for the Taliban, Baptist or Catholic. If the virus cannot control public education, it will seek to divert resources from public coffers to fundamentalist school funding. From the madrassa schools of Pakistan to the Christian push for school vouchers in the United States and the religious home school movement, religions seek to control education or to control the resources for education.

  Darrel Ray

  Christian, Religious, School

  "The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture". Book by Darrel Ray, 2009.

  8 Copy quote

• Some people who experience a religious conversion seem to undergo a personality change. They can be quite congenial and easygoing when talking about mundane things, but when they start talking about their faith, their demeanor changes. Their tone of voice modifies, their smile becomes tense and they become defensive when questioned about their evidence for belief. It becomes difficult to have a friendly conversation with them.

  Darrel Ray

  Religious, Talking, Voice

  "The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture". Book by Darrel Ray, 2009.

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• Many of them [people who escaped religion] recounted both the terror and the relief they felt after leaving religion behind. Terror at realizing there was no longer an imaginary friend; relief that no one was looking over their shoulder any more. Several described the experience as similar to that of a child learning to go to sleep without a favorite teddy bear. Others described it as simply growing up or outgrowing the need for the imaginary friends of childhood.

  Darrel Ray

  Children, Growing Up, Sleep

  7 Copy quote

• Jesus must have been married to have been called a rabbi.

  Darrel Ray

  Jesus, Religion, Married

  6 Copy quote

• Have you ever observed somebody go through a religious conversion? The person seems perfectly reasonable to you and has no particular concern for religion. Then a parent, friend or child dies or he gets a serious illness or is involved in a car accident. In just a matter of weeks, he seeks out and finds the answers to all of life's questions and starts studying and spouting all sorts of doctrine. During such a window of vulnerability, religion can commandeer a person's brain.

  Darrel Ray

  Religious, Children, Serious Illness

  "The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture". Book by Darrel Ray, 2009.

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• Islam has some of the best defenses against other god viruses and has the potential to be more parasitically aggressive when consolidating political power with a society.

  Darrel Ray

  Political, Religion, Islam

  6 Copy quote

• Simply disabling specific critical thinking skills is all that is necessary for the god virus [to take control of a person].

  Darrel Ray

  Thinking, Skills, Religion

  "The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture". Book by Darrel Ray, 2009.

  7 Copy quote

• Every religion ... has rituals, practices, holy writings or traditions, etc. Nothing like that has ever developed from Atheism. There are no holy men, holidays or holy books and no agreed-upon canons of faith. In fact, the only thing you can get some Atheists to agree upon is that there is no god.

  Darrel Ray

  Atheist, Book, Writing

  7 Copy quote

• The lancet fluke (Dicrocoelium) infects the brain of ants by taking control and driving them to climb to the top of a blade of grass where they can be eaten by a cow. The ingested fluke then lays eggs in the cow gut. Eventually, the eggs exit the cow, and hungry snails eat the dung (and fluke eggs). The fluke enters the snail's digestive gland and gets excreted in sticky slime full of a seething mass of flukes to be drunk by ants as a source of moisture.

  Darrel Ray

  Eggs, Drunk, Brain

  "The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture". Book by Darrel Ray, 2009.

  6 Copy quote

• Fundamentalism in most of its forms is the active creation of antibodies to some threatening [god] virus. As long as threatening religions or mutations [heresies] are present, fundamentalism will churn out antibodies to keep the population under control and prevent mutations from getting out of hand.

  Darrel Ray

  Hands, Long, Religion

  "The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture". Book by Darrel Ray, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

• Just as the chicken pox virus continues to live quietly in the body after the disease is gone, the god virus may live quietly in the host until something evokes it.

  Darrel Ray

  Religion, Gone, Body

  "The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture". Book by Darrel Ray, 2009.

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• Fundamentalist groups like Christian Embassy have infiltrated the very top of the U.S. military and gained positions of influence in the Pentagon.

  Darrel Ray

  Christian, Military, Groups

  "The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture". Book by Darrel W. Ray, 2009.

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