It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that faith, like certain diseases, can be harmful to humanity and is difficult to eliminate.
In this quote, Richard Dawkins draws a provocative comparison between faith and infectious diseases, arguing that while societal fears often focus on tangible threats like viruses, faith itself poses a significant danger by potentially fostering irrationality and dogma. He asserts that faith’s harmful effects can be as persistent and difficult to eradicate as a virus, reflecting his critical stance on the influence of religious beliefs in society.
In practice
In a debate about the impact of religion on society, this quote can highlight the potential dangers of blind 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.
If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
I felt that chess... is a science in the form of a game... I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.
The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands — and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference.
Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows – it is the result of physical forces set in operation by ethical forces.
Prayer is the slender nerve that moves the muscle of omnipotence.
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