“One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.”

The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really a…" by Richard Dawkins?

Richard Dawkins322

English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author 1941

Related quotes

“Religions exist because people would rather have a wrong answer than no answer at all.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Doomed

Source: Doomed

“It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear (2011)

“[…] one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 152 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007

“It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything, closes the door to finding out what's really there.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

“A reverent agnosticism can be on occasion a better evangelism than a religion which knows all the answers.”

William Barclay (1907–1978) Church of Scotland minister and academic

Source: Many Witnesses, One Lord

“There are three great questions which in life we have over and over again to answer. Is it right or wrong? Is it true or false? Is it beautiful or ugly? Our education ought to help us to answer these questions.”

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury book The Use of Life

The Use of Life (1894), ch. VI: National Education <br class="br">Source: The Use of Life http://archive.org/details/uselife02lubbgoog/page/n114/mode/2up on Archive.Org, pages 102—103

“Well, the correct answer is he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?”

Colin Powell (1937) Former U.S. Secretary of State and retired four-star general

“Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.”

John Tukey (1915–2000) American mathematician

The future of data analysis. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33 (1), (1962), page 13.
Variant: "An approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question." "as the renowned statistician John Tukey once reportedly said," according to Super Freakonomics page 224.

“To answer whether Islam truly is a religion of peace, we must consider what Islam teaches, not just what Muslims practice.”

Nabeel Qureshi (author) (1983–2017) Christian missionary, speaker and author who was a convert from his former Ahmadiyya background.

Source: Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward (2016), p. 28, Question 1: What is Islam?

“Ian McEwan: I guess my starting point would be: the brain is responsible for consciousness, and we can be reasonably sure that when that brain ceases to be, when it falls apart and decomposes, that will be the end of us. From that quite a lot of things follow, especially morally. We are the very privileged owners of a brief spark of consciousness, and we therefore have which one can work towards and maybe make sacrifices, and, crucially, make sacrifices of other people. We have a marvellous gift, and you see it develop in children, this ability to become aware that other people have minds just like your own and feelings that are just as important as your own, and this gift of empathy seems to me to be the building block of our moral system.Richard Dawkins: I profoundly agree with you, and I've always felt that one of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.Ian McEwan: And if you have a sacred text that tells you how the world began or what the relationship is between this sky-god and you, it does curtail your curiosity, it cuts off a source of wonder. The loveliness of the world in its wondrousness is not apparent to me in Islam or Christianity and all the other major religions.”

Ian McEwan (1948) British author

from The Root of All Evil?, Channel 4 documentary, United Kingdom (January 2006).

“One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Richard Dawkins322

Related quotes

Related topics