Richard Dawkins Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

  Richard Dawkins

  Meaningful, Atheist, Responsibility

  "The God Delusion". Book by Richard Dawkins, October 2, 2006.

• The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.

  Richard Dawkins

  Passion, Convince Us, Awe And Wonder

  Richard Dawkins (2000). “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder”, p.10, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.

  Richard Dawkins

  Awe And Wonder, Giving, Feelings

  Richard Dawkins (2000). “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder”, p.10, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Sleep, Thinking

  YouTube Channel "RodiAgnusDei"/"Richard Dawkins debates Rowan Williams", www.youtube.com. February 05, 2013.

• Next time that somebody tells you something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Thinking, Giving

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”, p.248, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose

  Richard Dawkins

  Giving, Purpose, Study

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.13, W. W. Norton & Company

• Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.

  Richard Dawkins

  Giving, Mysterious, Universe

  "Religion and Atheism". "Q&A" with Tony Jones, www.abc.net.au. April 9, 2012.

• The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion gives strong sanction to both-and mixes explosively with both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today.

  Richard Dawkins

  Strong, Two, Giving

• Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

  Richard Dawkins

  Ideas, Giving, Desire

  Source: inters.org

• It is an absurd law [Section 295A of the Indian penal code] but also extremely dangerous because it gives fanatics, whether they are Hindus, Catholics or Muslims, a licence to be offended. It also allows people who are in dispute with you to make up false accusations of blasphemy.

  Richard Dawkins

  Law, People, Giving

• Some physicists solve that problem of the necessity of finely tuned physical constants ... by invoking the anthropic principle, saying, well, here we are, we exist, we have to be in the kind of universe capable of giving rise to us. That in itself is, I think, unsatisfying, and as John Lennox rightly says, some physicists solve that by the multiverse idea-the idea that our universe is just one of many universes.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Ideas, Giving

• 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

  Loyalty, Religious, Business

• The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes. The lifetimes of DNA messages give or take a few mutations are measured in units ranging from millions of years to hundreds of millions of years; or, in other words, ranging from 10,000 individual lifetimes to a trillion individual lifetimes. Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle, in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifetimes.

  Richard Dawkins

  Dna, Years, Giving

• You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

  Richard Dawkins

  Giving, Understanding, Tutorial

  "The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder". BBC1 Television, November 12, 1996.

• If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.

  Richard Dawkins

  Giving Up, Memories, Brain

• I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world.

  Richard Dawkins

  Nice, Thinking, People

  "Divine dispatches: a religion roundup" Riazat Butt, www.theguardian.com. April 28, 2011.

• And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.

  Richard Dawkins

  Giving, Intuition, Principles

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.166, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Ironically, I originally wrote the tweet with Jews and thought, That might give offense. And so I thought I better change it.

  Richard Dawkins

  Giving, Might, Tweet

  Source: newrepublic.com

• I think there in a great deal to be said for religious education in the sense of teaching about religion and biblical literacy. Both those things, by the way, I suspect will prepare a child to give up religion. If you are taught comparative religion, you are more likely to realise that there are other religions than the one you have been brought up in. And if you are if you are taught to read the bible, I can think of almost nothing more calculated to turn you off religion.

  Richard Dawkins

  Religious, Children, Giving Up

• What Francis [Collins] was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues. It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he'd save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day.

  Richard Dawkins

  Giving, Would Be, Littles

  Source: inters.org

• Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God -- imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant -- and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave?

  Richard Dawkins

  Art, Brother, Father

• One of the possible reasons why we might be good is that we're frightened, frightened of God. We want the reward in Heaven, we don't want to go to Hell. That would be an ignoble, ignominious reason for being good, and I think that if anybody was good to you just because they hoped for a heavenly reward, you wouldn't respect them, you'd probably give them a wide berth.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Giving, Heaven

  "Richard Dawkins at the Sydney Writers' Festival". "The Science Show" with Robyn Williams, www.abc.net.au. September 8, 2007.

• I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare.

  Richard Dawkins

  Baby, Children, Pregnancy

• It's known that stress gives rise to disease. It's also known that many diseases, especially stress-related diseases, can be cured by placebos - pills that have no medicinal effect, but people think they do, and so they do.

  Richard Dawkins

  Stress, Thinking, People

  Faith and Reason - PBS, www.pbs.org.

• Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Giving, Understanding

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