We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologists
and author of bestselling books. He was a senior lecturer at the University of
Oxford until his retirement in 2008.
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| The God Delusion, published in 2006 |
Richard was born in 1941 in
West Africa (actual Kenya), where his father, John Dawkins, was pursuing his career
as a botanist at the agricultural department of the Colonial Services until
1949.
He earned his master's and
doctorate degrees in zoology from the University of Oxford and started a career
as a lecturer in 1966. He lectured at the University of California Berkeley from
1968 to 1970 and at Oxford until his retirement in 2008.
Richard was (and he’s still) annoyed at the way people are judging
and misunderstanding the theory of evolution. He decided to publish his first
book The Selfish Genes in 1976, in which he explained the
concept of genes and introduced a new term called memes: the cultural equivalent
of genes. If the genes use the bodies of living things to further their
survival, memes are following the same patterns of genes by propagating and
mutating from mind to mind.
In his following books, Richard has been debunking the myths
of creation by showing the contradictions between facts and beliefs. By analyzing
and studying fossils records of different species, he has been proving that
evolution has been taking place gradually since three or four billion years. He
also emphasizes that homo sapiens, modern humans, and chimpanzees are cousins;
they are both descendants of an ape that went extinct millions of years ago.
In addition to his talent as a biologist and zoologist, Richard has
a broad knowledge of history, archaeology and mythologies. As a matter of fact, he always
stresses that the Old Testament plagiarized ancient civilizations myths and
legends about creation and natural disasters. Example, in his book The Magic Of Reality, he perfectly described
how the Noah’s ark is a distorted copy of an old Mesopotamian myth: the epic
Gilgamesh. Utnapishtim, an old man(centuries old), told Gilgamesh that he was warned by a God that a great flood is coming and ordered him to build and ark and take the seeds of all leaving creatures. In the same book,
he beautifully described the beliefs and myths of native American, some African tribes and Aboriginal Australians.
In his best selling book the God Delusion, he took us back in time to the year 325 AD when the Roman Constantine converted to Christianity, forced Christians
to adopt the trinity, accepted four gospels only and ordered to burn the rest.
