-- Luk
--On Monday, September 17, 2001 6:26 PM +0000 Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Richard Dawkins in the Guardian:
>
> "I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody
> is too polite - or too devout - to notice: religion, and specifically the
> devaluing effect that religion has on human life. I don't mean devaluing
> the life of others (though it can do that too), but devaluing one's own
> life. Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
> ...
>
> "Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary
> cliche: mindless cowardice. 'Mindless' may be a suitable word for the
> vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what
> hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they
> were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently
> effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us
> mightily to understand where that courage came from.
>
> "It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying
> source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of
> this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not
> my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a
> world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like
> littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are
> used."
>
> [Full text:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4257777,00.html]
>
> Carl
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp