Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that extreme religious beliefs can lead to irrational and dangerous behavior, akin to mental illness.
Richard Dawkins argues that religion can inspire such irrational and harmful actions that it may be comparable to a mental illness. He implies that the fervor and blind faith displayed by some individuals can lead to folly, advocating a critical examination of faith and its implications in society.
In practice
In a debate about the impact of religion on society.
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.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
Economic and military power can be developed under the spur of laws and appropriations. But moral power does not derive from any act of Congress. It depends on the relations of a people to their God. It is the churches to which we must look to develop the resources for the great moral offensive that is required to make human rights secure, and to win a just and lasting peace.
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.
In fighting terror, you cannot let it interfere with the normal life of civilians in Israel.
If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.
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