We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticise it.
Interpretation
Religion often receives uncritical acceptance, and questioning it is seen as taboo.
In this quote, Richard Dawkins emphasizes that society has conditioned individuals to regard religion with a form of unwarranted reverence, making it difficult to openly challenge or critique its beliefs and practices. This notion implies that such a privileged status can hinder rational discourse and critical examination of religious ideologies.
In practice
In a debate on religious beliefs, one might use this quote to argue for the importance of questioning established norms.
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.
When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.
When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
Pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!
Before me things created were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.