Religions: dangerous collective delusions

Archive: Skeptics & Atheists

From a review of A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love by Richard Dawkins

The betrayal of science that does arouse him to fury comes from religion. Dawkins is an atheist, a strenuous and militant and proud one. He thinks religious belief is a dangerous virus, and that it is a crime to infect the mind of a child with it. He believes that “only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today.” He calls religions “dangerous collective delusions,” and he thinks that they are sinks of falsehood (most of them have to be, since only one can be true). He especially regrets their public influence. He is made apoplectic by the pontifications of religious “leaders” on such questions as whether human clones would be fully human, made in blissful ignorance of the fact that identical twins are clones of each other.

Simon Blackburn, The New Republic: The Ethics of Belief