Salon has a great interview (free day-pass required) with Richard Dawkins, famed evolutionary scientist and enlightened thinker. There are so many choice quotes from the interview that I had a hard time deciding what to pull to post on this blog, but I found this one to be a nugget:
Salon: How would we be better off without religion?
Dawkins: We'd all be freed to concentrate on the only life we are ever going to have. We'd be free to exult in the privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each one of us enjoys through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.
And who said atheists live a cold existence without a moral compass?
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