"...Science is advancing all time and religion is not, and religion is slowly dying," Dawkins told TV3 show The Nation on Saturday.

"It's dying much faster in some countries than others. It's dying very fast in western and northern Europe, I suspect in New Zealand as well."

Dawkins said on Twitter last week he was considering a visit to New Zealand soon.

Dawkins holds the belief that the supernatural does not exist, and he rejects mysticism.

The interviewer on The Nation, Lisa Owen, asked how he explained his acceptance things like poetry, music and love, things she said that "arguably are irrational."

Dawkins replied,"Oh, well, no. I mean, I think they're rational. "I mean, they have a rational explanation. Things like love, poetic sensibility, music, these are very, very real, very important human experiences..."

"So although we may not yet have a scientific explanation for what goes on in the brain, we do know that - well, I think we know - that it's things that are going on in the brain when you do fall in love or when you swoon at a piece of Schubert or something like that."

When asked if religion worked in the same way he replied, "Very probably it does, but, of course, that doesn't make it true, because religion is not just an emotion."

"I mean, religion actually does make factual claims about the universe, which, in my view, are false, and the mere fact that people have emotional reactions to them doesn't make them true."

Dawkins opposes all forms of religion, but he says at present Islam is the most dangerous

He said 500 years ago, Christianity was similarly dangerous but today its "teeth have been drawn".

Source

• nzherald.co.nz
• 3news.co.nz
• Image: scienceblogs.com

You need only consider the position the ghastly Kardashians occupy in the hearts and minds of millions of television viewers for evidence of that.

We wreck the world through overpopulation, squander resources and exterminate species far lovelier than ourselves. Climate change looks to be fiercely upon us. We're choking with plastic that nobody needs, yet everything we did to cause this situation was considered entirely reasonable. It still is, some would argue, on the basis of the profit motive. What could be less rational than that?

Just as Pope Francis takes over at the Vatican, hoping to anchor Catholicism firmly, overcome its scandals and demonstrate its values convincingly, the forces of darkness are planning to come here in the person of Sean Faircloth, whose surname I find amusing, all things considered.

Mr Faircloth is the American director of strategy and policy for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, or what, in the Pope's terms, might be called propagation of the faith. He is a devotee of the cult of Dawkinism, then, which argues that there is no God and therefore religion is absurd.

Why you need to join a club to believe that I don't know, since the world is crammed with busy atheists, but Mr Dawkins has had a revelation of the truth that requires followers, and the more the merrier. He deeply dislikes the evangelical Christian movement, a similar scenario to his own, in some ways, although with hymns.

"I'm looking for people from Down Under to be a voice for an international secular movement and to preach the gospel of rationality," Mr Faircloth says, apparently without irony. I think this man of the cloth protests too much.

As for me, I struggle to think of much in human endeavour that is more than slightly rational, and what I can think of has a track record every bit as unfortunate as religion's. For every war caused by religion, there has been an equally appalling one based on reason, or so the protagonists have thought. Continue reading

Sources

• Rosemary McLeod in The Dominion Post
• Image: The Northern Advocate

Rosemary McLeod is a New Zealand journalist