My Dogma Ran Over My Karma

Compare this list with the following statements by New Atheist writers;

"There is not a person in this room who has ever met a person whose worldview is as narrow as the worldview of Abraham, or Moses, or Jesus or Mohammed... These people knew nothing, next to nothing, of the facts that are now relevant to the 21st Century... And in moral terms, with a few notable exceptions, most of these people were no wiser than your average Afghan warlord today." - (Harris, 2011b. Emphasis present in the original speech)

“Mock them! Ridicule them! In public! Don’t fall for the convention that we are all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion makes specific claims which need to be challenged and, if necessary mocked, and with contempt.” – (Richard Dawkins, from his speech at the Mar. 24, 2012 Reason Rally in Washington DC. Quoted in Jinn [2010] footnote 1. My emphasis)

“I think mockery of religion is one of the most essential things. One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at things.” – (Hitchens, 2010)

"Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope." – (O'Rourke, 2000)

"I've always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot He's have given us bigger behinds to sit on and smaller heads to think with." – (O'Rourke, 2000)

“Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them.” – (Harris, 2005)

"If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an Atheist does." – (Hitchens, 2012)

"Scientists, with their implicit trust in reductionism, are privileged to be at the summit of knowledge, and to see further into truth than any of their contemporaries... there is no reason to expect that science cannot deal with any aspect of existence... Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion..." – (Atkins, 1995. My emphasis)

"Although poets may aspire to understanding, their talents are more akin to entertaining self- deception. Philosophers too, I am afraid, have contributed to the understanding of the universe little more than poets… I long for immortality, but I know that my only hope of achieving it is through science and medicine, not through sentiment and its subsets, art and theology" – (Atkins, 1995. My emphasis)