Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins FRS FRSLis an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 March 1941
CityNairobi, Kenya
Richard Dawkins quotes about
children rights parent
I guess there are some rights of parents with what they choose their children to learn, but I'm biased in favor of freeing children to learn and not letting parents be too doctrinaire in indoctrinating their children.
death children parent
...it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions.
atheist parent coincidence
It is a remarkable coincidence that almost everyone has the same religion as their parents and it always just so happens they're the right religion.
christian children parent
There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.
skulls childhood parent
In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science.
running childhood parent
Isn't it a remarkable coincidence almost everyone has the same religion as their parents ? And it always just happens to be the right religion. Religions run in families. If we'd been brought up in ancient Greece we would all be worshiping Zeus and Apollo. If we had been born Vikings we would be worshiping Wotan and Thor. How does this come about ? Through childhood indoctrination.
country names parent
I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.
children parent religion
THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all
christian children parent
A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.
atheist children parent
If circumcision has any justification AT ALL, it should be medical only. Parents' religion is the worst of all reasons - pure child abuse.
thoughtful matter born
How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.
rip successful catholic
The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose gains the phrase "ill-gotten" might have been specially invented. And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.
academic difficulty fill intrinsic law simplicity states subject vacuum
Dawkins Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity
conversation sure
I'm not sure this conversation can go any further.