Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the lack of evidence in religious faith while highlighting the pride that stems from it.
Richard Dawkins emphasizes that religious faith is characterized by a notable absence of evidence to support its claims, and he argues that this very independence from evidence is something that believers often celebrate. The statement suggests that rather than viewing faith through a lens of doubt or scrutiny, many individuals flaunt their faith as a point of pride, despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of empirical support.
In practice
During a debate on belief systems, one might reference this quote to highlight the conversation about the reliance on evidence in faith.
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.
We have become dangerously comfortable- believers ooze with wealth and let their addictions to comfort and security numb the radical urgency of the gospel.
I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.
While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.
Without order nothing can exist-without chaos nothing can evolve. Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Karma brings us ever back to rebirth, binds us to the wheel of births and deaths. Good Karma drags us back as relentlessly as bad, and the chain which is wrought out of our virtues holds as firmly and as closely as that forged from our vices.
If we seek the Buddha outside the mind, the Buddha changes into a devil.
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