Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Quotable | "Diet of Delusions"

As an atheist and scientist-of-sorts, I don't suffer qualms that this will be my fate. But I do understand that there is a bit of me that "does God" whether I like it or not. I'm not alone in that. There are many thinkers who hold - and some good scientific evidence to back them up - that spirituality is hard-wired in humans to a variable extent, and that it is beneficial to health - physical and mental. What really causes the confusion is that while something of this sort can be good for us, can even be essential and has probably contributed enormously to our evolutionary survival - it is not necessarily true. I would say, it is manifestly not true. We subsist on a diet of delusions." -- Margaret Cook, "Even atheists believe in a lot more than the selfish gene" (Sun 23 Apr 2006)

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