The God Virus Quotes

“The beauty of science is that people actually change their minds based on new evidence.”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“Throughout the United States, divorce rates are highest where evangelical religious practices are strongest, in the Bible Belt.10”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“The best prophylactic for god viruses, especially fundamentalist variants, is science education. The more science is taught or discussed, the fewer tools a god virus has to infect populations.”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“Religion does three things quite effectively: divides people, controls people, deludes people.” -Carlespie Mary Alice”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“Simply disabling specific critical thinking skills is all that is necessary for the god virus.”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“People with high dependency needs have difficulty standing up to this level of social sanction. The more dependent, the less able they are to use their native intelligence. They depend instead on the word of religious authority.”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“The pressure to bind is always present. Once the virus gets one hook into the culture, it has the means to place many more. In this case a hook might be reestablishing prayer in schools, which could lead to reading Bible verses in classrooms, which quickly leads to using schools for religious instruction, and so on. A culture that is bound with religion soon becomes an oppressive and toxic place for those who are not infected with the god virus.”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“Once a religion binds with a new culture, it has a tendency to latch on like a parasite and direct cultural development in ways that ensure security of the religion and propagation. Religion embeds in the culture as a rabies virus embeds in the brain of a dog or raccoon. Successful binding creates the illusion that culture and religion are one, and followers come to believe that the culture could not survive without the religion. Further,”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“Nothing seems more pitiable than otherwise intelligent people gathering every Sunday to struggle ever so hard to understand something that is unintelligible.”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“Living true to ourselves is the greatest gift we can give our children and the world. Developments”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“Scientific ideas also infect minds but with one caveat: those ideas have to create a link to objective reality in order to survive. Ideas”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“arguing or pointing out the inconsistencies only creates defensiveness, and when someone is defensive, dialogue is no longer possible. Defensive people do not learn or change because they cannot listen. Creating defensiveness does not help the cause of rational discussion and change. Being self-aware means learning to observe not just ourselves, but the way others react to us. People mirror our impact.”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“The chains men bear they forged themselves. Strike off their chains and they will weep for their lost security.” This”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

“While we may never be fully safe from fundamentalism, the best prevention is solid education in the sciences.”
― Darrel W. Ray, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture