Richard Dawkins

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.