Richard Dawkins
May. 14th, 2006 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leblonIt is a rare pleasure to read an author as distinguished and as openly anti-religious as Richard Dawkins:
"The premise of Zahavi's idea is that natural selection will favour scepticism among females... The only way for a male ... to authenticate his boast of strength ... is to prove that it is true by shouldering a truly costly handicap - a handicap that only a genuinely strong ... male could beat. It may be called the principle of costly authentication. And now to the point. Is it possible that some religious doctrines are favoured not in spite of being ridiculous but precisely because they are ridiculous? Any wimp in religion could believe that bread symbolically represents the body of Christ, but it takes a real, red-blooded Catholic to believe something as daft as the transubstantiation. If you can believe that you can believe anything..." (Richard Dawkins, Viruses of the Mind).
I love his style!
"The premise of Zahavi's idea is that natural selection will favour scepticism among females... The only way for a male ... to authenticate his boast of strength ... is to prove that it is true by shouldering a truly costly handicap - a handicap that only a genuinely strong ... male could beat. It may be called the principle of costly authentication. And now to the point. Is it possible that some religious doctrines are favoured not in spite of being ridiculous but precisely because they are ridiculous? Any wimp in religion could believe that bread symbolically represents the body of Christ, but it takes a real, red-blooded Catholic to believe something as daft as the transubstantiation. If you can believe that you can believe anything..." (Richard Dawkins, Viruses of the Mind).
I love his style!
