It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol, often worn around the neck. Lenny Bruce rightly quipped that 'If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.' But the theology and punishment-theory behind it is even worse. The sin of Adam and Eve is thought to have passed down the male line - transmitted in the semen according to Augustine. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor? Augustine, by the way, who rightly regarded himself as something of a personal authority on sin, was responsible for coining the phrase 'original sin'. Before him it was known as 'ancestral sin'. Augustine's pronouncements and debates epitomize, for me, the unhealthy preoccupation of early Christian theologians with sin. They could have devoted their pages and their sermons to extolling the sky splashed with stars, or mountains and green forests, seas and dawn choruses. These are occasionally mentioned, but the Christian focus is overwhelmingly on sin sin sin sin sin sin sin. What a nasty little preoccupation to have dominating your life.
Above all things, I love your soul. Through the veil of your flesh, I see it shine in the darkness: it surrounds me, transforms me, saturates me, enchants me. So I speak to feel that I exist, because if I didn't speak, my tongue would paralyze, my heart would cease to beat, I would dry up completely dazzled.
"As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.' Michael Shermer, in The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder,' you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you.' If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. I suspect that quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivates them to be good, especially if they belong to one of those faiths that systematically exploits personal guilt.
It seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that, should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness."
Newton is possibly the greatest scientist of all time, and was a strong believer in God. So how does Dawkins deal with Newton? He tries to neutralize Isaac Newton by claiming he was a fake, motivated by money. This is how he does it – the passage is in Dawkins' book The God Delusion. Dawkins starts with a quote from Bertrand Russell who said: "Intellectually eminent men disbelieve the Christian religion, but hide the fact, because they are afraid of losing their income." The next sentence is: "Newton was religious." The insinuation is that Newton was faking belief in God to get money. This is totally false.
If Newton was faking it, he really overdid it. He wrote to his friend Richard Bentley: "When I wrote my treatise [Principia Mathematica], I had an eye upon such principles as might work for the belief of a deity, and nothing can rejoice me more, than to find it useful for that purpose." He read the Bible every day; attacked and ridiculed atheists and wrote letters encouraging opponents of atheism. Newton wrote:
Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things, and knows all that is or can be done. This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being.
And this: "It is the perfection of God's works, that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion." Galileo said: "The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go." Galileo, Newton and Einstein all believed in God, therefore Dawkins' claim that science and religion are in conflict is nonsense.
Most of the younger generation don't know that before he was the world's best-known evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins was the original host of TV's Family Feud!
He was also a much beloved regular on another game show, Match Game, hosted by the selfish Gene Rayburn.
Here, Dawkins relaxes backstage with one of the Celebrity Feud families.
“Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought.”
living with my girlfriend for a couple of days - we wake up, go for a walk, have breakfast together, wfh, cook together, go on a walk again at the BEACH, talk talk talk, order something “new” for dinner, have some wine & sleep off. Life is perfect.. so perfect when you're delusional.
Jesus' family values, it has to be admitted, were not such as one might wish to focus on. He was short, to the point of brusqueness, with his own mother, and he encouraged his disciples to abandon their families to follow him. 'If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.' The American comedian Julia Sweeney expressed her bewilderment in her one-woman stage show, Letting Go of God: 'Isn't that what cults do? Get you to reject your family in order to inculcate you?
Look for me there above the white clouds for a moment Is it still white Excuse me I see it red Do you have a lot of questions I don't have any answers for you , Do you know where they put my mind I've been looking for it for a while I feel frozen here , I'm becoming a trooper of this area, don't ask me to land, I told you they're over there, they are noisy, I really can't stand those sounds, so have this tea with me, and then let's have a nap, or maybe I'll stare at myself in the mirror for a bit.