Calling All Atheists

From the accompanying YouTube commentary to this seminal 2002 TED lecture by Richard Dawkins (no point in reinventing the wheel…):

The session was titled “The Design of Life,” and the TED audience was probably expecting remarks about evolution’s role in our history from biologist Richard Dawkins. Instead, he launched into a full-on appeal for atheists to make public their beliefs and to aggressively fight the incursion of religion into politics and education (quoting Douglas Adams in the bargain). Scientists and intellectuals hold very different beliefs about God from the American public, he says, yet they are cowed by the overall political environment. Dawkins’ scornful tone drew strongly mixed reactions from the audience; some stood and applauded his courage. Others wondered whether his strident approach could do more harm than good. Dawkins went on to publish The God Delusion and become perhaps the world’s best-known atheist.

It’s really a statement of what should now be completely obvious — religion is a dismal failure of the imagination… an impoverished ideology and vestigial philosophical remnant of our primitive origins that stubbornly persists largely by virtue of tradition and mawkish sentimentality.

Note: If you don’t care to sit through the whole thing (about 30 mins. in total) then at least treat yourself to the first few minutes of video #2 in which Dawkins plays “guest editor” of a fictitious scientific journal positing the question: “Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?” in response to which he then proffers several imagined “religious” answers to this mystery, illustrating how perfectly ludicrous and inadequate “faith-based” thinking is when it comes to addressing scientific problems.