People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face; they seem to identify personally with it.
Interpretation
Criticism of one's beliefs can provoke strong defensive reactions, as people often see their beliefs as part of their identity.
Richard Dawkins highlights the intense emotional connection individuals have with their religious beliefs. When criticized, many people perceive it as a personal attack, leading to defensiveness and hostility. This suggests that religion is not just a set of beliefs for many; it is intertwined with their self-identity, making any critique feel like an insult to their very being.
In practice
In a debate about faith, one might quote Dawkins to highlight why people react strongly to religious criticism.
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.
The first, that their pretensions to this possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant.
What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate?
I have always marched to my own beat, and most frequently, it was inconsistent not only with my own immediate family, but with my culture as well.
The only right a Christian has is the right to give up his rights.
All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is Godβs myth where the others are menβs myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call 'real things'.
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