Richard Dawkins: 'Somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist'

[Applause] he's an evolutionary biologist turned celebrity atheist he sold millions of books since he published the selfish gene in 1976 and his last big hit was the god delusion which came out in 2004. but after all that best-selling success do people buy into his brand of anti-religious belief do they agree with him that religion amounts to a pernicious virus to find out i've come to some paul's cathedral to survey a random flock well i can see where he's coming from but however i i think that religion although it does have some bits that i think it could lose it is it gives something it gives people a purpose to keep to keep going and i think now we look at what's happening in the particularly in the um in the middle east now a lot of it is religion bound and i'm afraid um i was brought up as a catholic but i'm afraid i've got very little time for that as well now you're thoroughly lapsed i have pretty thoroughly lapsed yes you believe in god yeah enough to go to one of these places every once in a while well every once in a while i wouldn't say i was a christian what would you say you were festive at christmas okay he still wouldn't like you fanatical religion is a virus potentially but religion in itself has a lot of good things about it such as uh believing there's a greater purpose um life after death those kind of things that make us feel warm and fuzzy inside but um what if it's a lot of rubbish no one can prove that do you have faith yourself uh is there someone upstairs yes richard dawkins you've talked a lot in terms of of religion being a pernicious virus when you talk in those sort of emotional quite visceral terms are you doing that to sort of raise hackles and therefore heighten the debate do you think i don't think i've talked a lot about it being pernicious i'm not even sure i ever used the word pernicious viruses definitely virus and the point there is really not the pernicious aspect although i actually think it is pernicious the point there is that it's infectious it's something that grips the mind uh in the same way as a virus a conventional virus grips the body in that it takes control and it does so the better to propagate itself but in choosing words like that or on occasion i've read that you've said you despise organized religion or religious belief actually are very emotive terms for someone from academic from an academic background are you doing that because you feel it's in the interest of the cause that you're pursuing that debate is quite highly charged i wonder if they're as emotive as you think they are um i suspect that because we've all been brought up with this sort of culture of respecting religion that anything comparatively mild uh sounds more outspoken than it really is i mean the the really do you really despise religious belief i despise uh people who believe something without evidence and then go out and take action which damages other people yes so i despise people who whose belief in religion is so firm and so unshakable that they actually think it justifies killing people right of course many people like but your average devout worshiper who's sitting in a pew of a sunday morning you're clearly christmas of course i don't know what are your feelings towards them well i mean uh they're harmless especially church of england i mean that they're harmless i don't have strong feelings one way or the other no no of course i don't despise them here's the thing i am an agnostic uh i have thought about uh the tenets certainly of christian belief uh and as far as believing in god is concerned sort of found them wanting or myself unable to be convinced but i still think i can't possibly know whether god exists or not anymore i mean am i being sort of uh what's the word oh you know weak willed guilty of not having the courage of my convictions no i mean i'm i'm an agnostic too in that in that sense in the god delusion i made a seven point scale one was total conviction that there is a god and seven is total conviction that there isn't and i put myself as a six okay so that's kind of agnostic but veering towards towards atheist and i would be a six with respect to fairies and and and pixies and and werewolves and things like that um but there are people who will say because they're agnostic that puts them absolutely right in the middle the probability of there being a god and they're not being a god is exactly 50 50. and that i think is the wrong sort of agnostic to be because i think you can sort of put a probability figure on it you can say well i think a god is very unlikely but i can't actually disprove it so i'm not a i'm not a seven i'm a i'm i'm a 6.5 or something like that and that's where i would put myself what about the fact that religion in terms of its institutional influence persists how much does that well irritate you it's weird that those countries that have sort of the trappings of theocracy remaining like britain because we have uh bishops in the house of lords we have lots and lots of faith schools and we have um the queen is the head of the church of england um it's an odd thing that those countries like britain like the scandinavian countries which have an established church seem to be the least religious and a country like america which has written into its constitution the separation between church and state a wall of separation as jefferson called it um is is one of the most religious countries in the most religious country in the western world so there's an odd negative correlation with what you might naively expect how do you explain that do you think well various explanations have been offered i mean one one explanation is that um in a country like britain where religion is part of the establishment it's become sort of boring uh whereas in america where there's the wall of separation religion has become free enterprise and so you have mega churches with their own television stations their own um crashes to look after the children their own gyms they become huge commercial enterprises tax-free by the way which helps with the televangelists having private learjets to jet around in and and fleets of posh cars and things it's a very very big business uh religion in america whereas in britain it's become sort of boring and people don't really take it very seriously one way or the other politics is very reluctant to go anywhere near this i mean in terms of the solutions to some of what you're talking about the only place we can look is to politics the state has to act perhaps things have to be legislated for and yet i mean there was eleven fuss when ed miliband recently said he was an atheist there's a sort of it goes back to what you said before i think about not offending religious sensibilities yes there's a sort of twitchiness about it i think that's still yeah i think and then i suppose my questions given the amount of energy you expend on this issue how are you how are you aiming to get over that because it does stand in the way yes of society achieving the sort of shape that someone like you would like it to achieve yes and my colleague dan dennett coined the phrase belief in belief lots and lots of people are not religious themselves but they've got a vague idea it's a good thing that other people are it's very patronizing and condescending by the way it's sort of the idea well you and i of course are too intelligent to be religious but the common people need it um and a lot of people who actually think that a lot of people think that we need religion in order to be moral they there are a lot of people who think that if you took religion away people would start you know rushing around smashing shop windows and rubbing and raping and things like that no evidence for that whatever i mean absolutely none so i think one important thing we've got to do is to prise apart religion from morality it's absolute nonsense to say that you need religion in order to be moral and so i think that would be one major step we could we could take you don't need to send your child to a faith school in order to instill in that child a sense of morality a sense of good citizenship for whatever reason even in a secular country like this we have arrived at a point where there's a sort of latent belief within the popular consciousness that to be scientific is to somehow be sort of desiccated and dry and uh to miss out on the magic and mystery of one's experiences and the world and so on you dispute that right so not only dispute it i mean it's just the exact opposite of the truth science is wonderful science is amazing the the fact that you could understand why you exist who could not be turned on who could not be excited by that who would ever want to live in a world where you live your life you go to work you go to the office whatever it is you go to the football match this goes on year after year and then you die and you don't have any understanding of why you were there in the first place that's desiccated that's dry what is not dry and desiccated is coming into the world as it were awakening in the in the world and awakening in the fullest sense of of seeing the universe seeing the stars seeing down a microscope seeing what's inside every single cell seeing what's inside the brain and marveling at this wonderful gift of life that we have albeit temporarily marveling at this gift of understanding why we exist and rejoicing in it for as long as we do exist richard dawkins thank you very much thank you

Channel: The Guardian

Views: 3,077,550

Rating: 4.5133405 out of 5

Keywords: Richard Dawkins, Religion, Evolution, Christianity, Islam, the guardian, God, Jesus, Darwin, Creationism, Interview, The God Delusion, richard dawkins interview, richard dawkins jesus, richard dawkins muslims, richard dawkins islam, richard dawkins religion, richard dawkins atheism, the four horsemen, richard dawkins evolution, richard dawkins creationism, richard dawkins darwin, faith, atheism, atheist, atheist vs christian street, atheist vs christian, atheist debate, atheist vs religion

Id: dQ5QG3MUTtg

Length: 9min 49sec (589 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/DorotheaLadislaw]

Great clip...I upvoted it. But he never actually says the quote. or did I miss it?

[u/ellpol]

lol they kept saying "pernicious" ...I had to google it :-( Also I didn't hear the quote in the post

[u/[deleted]]

Didn't hear the quote, but the bit he said about the difference between religion in Britain and the U.S. was quite interesting.

I also thought the part where the interviewer surveyed people before the interview was interesting too. Nobody was like "I BELIEVE THE BIBLE. JESUS, FUCK YEAH", the overall sentiment was basically "eh....maybe?"