IDEAS FROM THE BOOK "GOD DELUSION" by Prof:RICHARD DAWKINS

You can be an Atheist who is happy, balanced, moral and intellectually fulfilled.

If you want to say, "God is energy", then you can find GOD in a lump of coal.

Dawkins is not in favour of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of it.But he is intrigued and mystified by the disproportionate privileging of Religion in our otherwise secular societies.

Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one figment of imagination and many.

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 begotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests,"

MIRACLES by definition, violate the principles of science.

There are athlets who believe GOD helps them win-against opponents who would seem on the face of it, no less worthy of his favouritism.There are motorists who believe that God saves them a parking space-thereby presumably depriving somebody else.

Every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the Royal family.Shouldn't they therefore, be unusually fit, compared with the rest of us who are prayed for, only by the nearest and dearest.?

George W Bush says that God told him to invade Iraque(a pity that God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction!)

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.

Why do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do to please God is to BELIEVE in him?What is so special about believing?Isn't it just as likely thatGod would reward KINDNESS,GENEROSITY or HUMILITY??

Design is not the only alternative to chance.Natural selection is the better alternative.

Predators seem beautifully "designed" to catch prey animals, while the prey animals seem equally beautifully "designed" to escape them/.Whose side is GOD on?

Darwin ansd his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow gradual degrees from simple beginings.We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creaturers is just that-An illusion.

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.

Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and elders tell them.Flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility.

Quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivate them to be good, especially if they belong a faith that exploits personal guilt.

Morality, in the absense of policing is somehow more truly moral than the kind of false morality that vanishes as soon as the police go on strike.

"Religion is an insult to human dignity.With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.But, for good people to do evil things, it takes religion." Nobel prize winning Physicist Steven Weinberg.

Religion teaches us not to change our minds!

Children have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas. and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it.

Children should be taught how to think rather than what to think.

Individuals who are most afraid of Death, are the religious ones.

Our life is as meaningful as we choose to make it.

The knowledge that wev have only one life, should make it all the more precious.

Be thrilled to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding.Even better, we may eventually understand that THERE ARE NO LIMITS.