The God Delusion

by Richard Dawkins

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.

It could have yielded a positive result. And if it had, can you imagine that a single religious

the real war is between rationalism and superstition.

Creationism is just a symptom of what they see as the greater enemy: religion.

‘Oh golly, Brer Fox, your forthright assertion—that evolutionary biology disproves the idea of a creator God—jeopardises the teaching of biology in science class, since teaching that would violate the separation of church and state!’ Right. You also ought to soft-pedal physiology, since it declares virgin birth impossible . . .

The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them. The aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods, just as missionaries were treated as gods