The God Delusion

by Richard Dawkins

'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.'

How many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for cheeking your parents?

evolution really does provide an explanation for the existence of entities whose improbability would otherwise, for practical purposes, rule them out.

Swinburne at one point attempted to justify the Holocaust on the grounds that it gave the Jews a wonderful opportunity to be courageous and noble. Peter Atkins splendidly growled, 'May you rot in hell.'

The historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of divine status is minimal.

Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mention almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus' life.

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.

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. —BERTRAND RUSSELL

That is, the higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold "beliefs" of any kind.'

Simply postulate a nasty god—such as the one who stalks every page of the Old Testament. Or, if you don't like that, invent a separate evil god, call him Satan, and blame his cosmic battle against the good god for the evil in the world.