A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.
Interpretation
A delusion is a belief held without evidence, often contrary to facts.
In this quote, Richard Dawkins highlights the nature of delusions as beliefs that persist in the absence of supporting evidence. Such delusions can serve as a commentary on human cognition and the tendency to believe in unfounded ideas, despite clear evidence to the contrary, which can have significant implications in various aspects of life, from personal beliefs to societal issues.
In practice
In a debate about pseudoscience, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of evidence in forming beliefs.
No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really was the historic homeland of the Jews.
In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.
I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.
I live in a working-class community that is struggling at the poverty line, where people who work full-time jobs still at my corner bodega use food stamps. Do you think they care what the stock market's doing today or what the GDP number is? No.
There is only one way by which I can get right with God, and that is through the death of Jesus Christ. I must get rid of the underlying idea that I can ever be right with God because of my obedience. Who of us could ever obey God to absolute perfection!
If we use goods made from raw materials that are obtained from a poor country without the proceeds being used to benefit the people of that country, we become complicit in a particularly iniquitous form of grand larceny.
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.
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