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Atheism

READ BY RICHARD DAWKINS WITH LALLA WARD

In his first memoir, Richard Dawkins shares a rare view into his early life, his intellectual awakening at Oxford, and his path to writing The Selfish Gene. He paints a vivid picture of his idyllic childhood in colonial Africa, and later at boarding school, where he began his career as a skeptic.

Arriving at Oxford in 1959, Dawkins began to study zoology and was introduced to some of the university's legendary mentors as well as its tutorial system. It's to this unique educational system that Dawkins credits his awakening. In 1973, provoked by the dominance of group selection theory and inspired by the work of William Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and John Maynard Smith, he began to write a book he called, jokingly, "my bestseller." It was, of course, The Selfish Gene.

This is an intimate memoir of the childhood and intellectual development of the evolutionary biologist and world-famous atheist and how he came to write what is widely held to be one of the most important books of the twentieth century.

AN APPETITE FOR WONDER by Richard Dawkins

In this interview, Richard Dawkins discusses his new memoir, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist. He recounts bullying and sexual abuse in boarding school, addresses criticism he has received over using the term "minor pedophilia," and talks about "privilege" as it relates to himself and to religion. He explores the relationship between science and atheism, and discusses his role in creating a cultural moment for atheism. He talks about differences between the skeptics movement and the atheist movement. He describes important mentors, and the role of education and of the theory of evolution in fostering his outlook. And he also answers a number of insightful audience questions.

Richard Dawkins interviewed by D.J. Grothe | 10/18/13 | University of Southern California

Christopher Hitchens delivers an anthem for free speech

Christopher Hitchens On Free Speech

Ten Commandments - Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens sits down with Salman Rushdie to discuss Hitchens’ searing memoir, Hitch 22, that lays bare the many contradictions in his life and affirms his conviction that all personal is also political. This was recorded June 8, 2010 at 92nd Street Y.

Christopher Hitchens with Salman Rushdie: 92Y Talks Podcast Episode 3

Renowned British ethologist, Richard Dawkins, discusses science and religion with physicist and World Science Festival co-founder Brian Greene. Recorded September 24, 2013 at 92nd Street Y.

Richard Dawkins with Brian Greene: 92Y Talks Episode 4

Richard Dawkins Brilliant Quote

Richard Dawkins - This Is My Vision of "Life"

Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss Q&A session after a screening of the Unbelievers (http://www.unbelieversmovie.com/). Recorded at Conway Hall, London. 23rd October 2014

Richard Dawkins And Lawrence Krauss - An Evening With The Unbelievers

The second and final part of Richard Dawkins' memoirs

In An Appetite for Wonder Richard Dawkins brought us his engaging memoir of the first 35 years of his life from early childhood in Africa to publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, when he shot to fame as one of the most exciting new scientists of his generation. In Brief Candle in the Dark he continues his autobiography, following the threads that have run through the second half of his life so far and homing in on the key individuals, institutions and ideas that inspired and motivated him. 

He paints a vivid picture, coloured with wit, anecdote and digression, of the twenty-five postgraduate years he spent teaching at Oxford. He pays affectionate tribute to past colleagues and students, recalling the idiosyncrasies of an establishment steeped in ancient tradition and arcane ritual while also recording his respect for the profound commitment to learning and discovery that lies at its core. He invites us to share the life of a travelling scientist, from fieldwork on the Panama Canal to conferences of stratospheric eminence in exotic locations in the company of some of the most prominent of the world’s scientific luminaries. And he describes his experiences with his many publishers, television producers, interviewers and partners in debate, not least in the heady period when, after publication of The God Delusion in 2006, he is dubbed the world’s most outspoken and controversial atheist. 

Most important of all, for the first time he reviews with fresh and stimulating insights the evolving narrative of his ideas about science over the course of his highly distinguished career as thinker, teacher and writer. In Brief Candle in the Dark we are invited to enter with him a constantly stimulating world of discovery and to meet a fascinating cast of exceptional characters described by the talented pen of one of the most exceptional of them all.

Includes a bonus PDF of photographs.

Brief Candle In The Dark written and read by Richard Dawkins (Audiobook Extract)

Quote of the book "God is not great" by Christopher Hitchens describing atheists, 

Atheists According To Christopher Hitchens

Richard Dawkins - The Magic of Reality PART 1

Richard Dawkins - The Magic of Reality PART 2

Christopher Hitchens passed recently, and while manyh of his beliefs may not align with many of ours, he got it right on Islamic Terrorists. Listen to the late author's golden rate.

Leftist-Atheist Christopher Hitchens Got It Right On Islamic Terrorists

Dr. Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and the author of the New York Times bestsellers The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Harris writing has been published in over 15 languages. He is a Co-Founder and CEO of The Reason Project, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

Transcript :-

I’m going to talk about belief, specifically the problem of religious belief, because I happen to think that how we deal with belief, how we criticise, or fail to criticise the beliefs of other human beings at this moment has more to do with the maintenance of civilization than anything else that is in our power to influence. Our world has been balkanised, as Moses just said, by incompatible religious dogmas; we have Christians against Muslims against Jews. The books themselves make incompatible claims. We have this founding notion that God wrote one of our texts; unfortunately we have many such books on hand.

Now, before I launch into my heresy, I want to say upfront that I am going to offend a few people in this room. I know you are very likely a secular bunch; I come from a country to your south that is fast growing as blinkered by religious lunacy as the wilds of Afghanistan, but still I think some people in this room will be offended by what I say. I want to say upfront that my intention really is not to offend anyone, I’m not being deliberately provocative, I am simply worried. I am going to worry out loud for the next 20 minutes, because I see no reason for us to expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely.

Full transcript :- http://tommypetersbicycles.blogspot.com/2012/01/sam-harris-end-of-faith-2005.html

(Advanced appreciation is rendered for materials used without express permission of copyright owners - Tommy Peters)

Sam Harris • The End of Faith • 2005

An excerpt from The God Debate II held 2011 with William Lane Craig and Sam Harris on the moot “Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural?” 

Excerpt Transcript:- 

Nine million children die every year before they reach the age of five. Picture an Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those, every ten days, killing children only under five. Ok, that’s 20, 24,000 children a day, a thousand an hour, 17 or so a minute. That means before I can get to the end of this sentence, some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony. Ok, think of the parents of these children. 

Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered. Ok, but according to Dr. Craig, this is all part of God’s plan. Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn’t care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil.

And worse than that, on Dr. Craig’s view, most of these people - many of these people, certainly will be going to Hell because they’re praying to the wrong God. Just think about that. Ok, through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and they missed the revelation. Ok, there are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment. Most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. Ok, in Dr. Craig’s universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are, if you are praying to the Monkey God Hanuman, you are doomed, ok. You’ll be tortured in Hell for eternity. Now, is there the slightest evidence for this? No. It just says so in Mark 9, and Matthew 13, and Revelation 14. Ok, perhaps you’ll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says when the elves die, they go to Valanor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison.

Ok, so God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus, ok. He engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance of revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire. Ok, on the other hand, on Dr. Craig’s account, your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America, ok, who spent his life raping and torturing children, need only come to God, come to Jesus, on Death Row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he’s going to spend an eternity in Heaven after death, ok. One thing should be crystal clear to you: This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability.

Ok, and please notice the double standard that people like Dr. Craig use to exonerate God from all this evil, ok. We’re told that God is loving, and kind, and just, and intrinsically good; but when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people, of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we’re told that God is mysterious, ok. “Who can understand God’s will?” 

Ok and yet, this is precisely - this “merely human” understanding of God’s will, is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. You know, something good happens to a Christian, he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive change in his life, and we’re told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents’ arms and drowned, we’re told that God is mysterious, ok. This is how you play tennis without the net.

And I want to suggest to you, that it is not only tiresome when otherwise-intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. Ok, this kind of faith, is, is really the perfection of narcissism. “God loves me, dontcha know. He, he cured me of my eczema. He makes me feel so good while singing in church, and, and just when we had given up hope, we found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother’s mortgage.”

Ok, given all the good, all that this God of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others, given, given the, the misery that’s being imposed on some helpless child at this instant, this kind of faith is obscene. Ok, to think in this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings. And if God is good and loving and just and kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery? Why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people for imaginary crimes, like witchcraft. Now, of course, there is a way of not taking these questions to heart, ok. According to Dr. Craig’s Divine Command theory, God is not bound by moral duties; God doesn’t have to be good. Whatever he commands is good, so when he commands that the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it.

Ok, well here we’re being offered - I’m glad he raised the issue of psychopathy - we are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. It’s psychotic because this is completely delusional. There’s no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh. But it is, it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the, from the well-being of human beings. It, this so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Ok, just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up, convinced that they are agents of God’s will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can say against their behavior, in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim that they’re praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.

Now, I’m obviously not saying that all that Dr. Craig, or all religious people, are psychopaths and psychotics, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. 

If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is gonna turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, ok, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic.

And, and I’m not the first person to notice that it’s a very strange sort of loving God who would make salvation depend on believing in him on bad evidence. Ok, it’s, I mean, if you lived 2,000 years ago, there was evidence galore, I mean, he was just performing miracles. But apparently, he got tired of being so helpful. And so now, we all inherit this very heavy burden of the doctrine’s implausibility. And, and, and, and the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos and what we know about the all-too-human origins of Scripture becomes more and more difficult. Ok, and, and, and it’s not just the generic God that Dr. Craig is recommending; it is God the Father and Jesus the Son. Christianity, on Dr. Craig’s account, is the true moral wealth of the world.

Well, I hate to break it to you, here at Notre Dame, but Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice. Christianity is not a religion that repudiates human sacrifice. It is a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were effective. “God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” John 3:16. Okay, the idea is that Jesus suffered the crucifixion so that none need suffer Hell—except those billions in India, and billions like them throughout history. Ok, this is, this is, this is astride, this doctrine is astride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism. We come from people who used to bury children under the foundations of new buildings as offerings to their imaginary gods. Ok, just think about that. There, in vast numbers of societies, people would bury children in postholes–—people like ourselves—–thinking that this would prevent an invisible being from knocking down their buildings. These are the sorts of people who wrote the Bible. Ok, if there is a less moral, moral framework than the one Dr. Craig is proposing, I haven’t heard of it.

(Advanced appreciation is rendered for materials used without express permission of copyright owners – Tommy Peters)

http://tommypetersbicycles.blogspot.com/2012/01/sam-harris-christianity-cult-of.html

Sam Harris • Christianity, a cult of Sacrifice • 2011

Christopher Hitchens speaks on “Crucibles: Past and Present” followed by a conversation with PEN World Voices Festival Chair, Salman Rushdie. Hitchens replaces Sherman Alexie who was previously scheduled.

Christopher Hitchens Freedom to Write Lecture

Christopher Hitchens

Richard Dawkins on Faith

In what was an exciting ABC first, Pool released some ABC audio and video archives back to the public for use and re-use under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence. This audio was part of the Gene Pool remix project. If you use or reuse this clip, please attribute ABC <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow">The Science Show</a>.

This audio is an excerpt of a debate between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould recorded in Oxford in 1987. They discuss their differing interpretations of Darwin's theory of evolution. It was first broadcast on The Science Show on September 3rd 1988. You can read the full transcript here.

TRANSCRIPT:
If there is life elsewhere in the universe, we so far know nothing about the details. It may be based on silicon chemistry rather than carbon chemistry, it may flourish near the centre of hot stars, or it may flourish near the absolute zero temperature, it may be too small or too large for us to see or apprehend with our senses. But one thing I believe we can already be sure of, it will have evolved by a form of Darwinian selection, and this is why, for me, the most important thing Darwinism has to offer is its explanation of adaptation.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2940659385">Image</a> from the collection of the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/smithsonian">Smithsonian Institution</a>. No known copyright restrictions.

Richard Dawkins on adaptation, The Science Show

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Atheism

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