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“... new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The ...”

“... close nor unbridgeably wide. That we are vestigially an interbreeding ring species reminds Richard Dawkins in these pages of that song: ‘I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales.’ That we happen not to interbreed with our co-survivors is because a synchronic species barrier has ...”

“... to the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade. ‘Fatima’s Poem’ is addressed to Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn (1737-1808), and was inspired by a visit to Penrhyn Castle, one of eleven National Trust houses involved in the project. Pennant’s family owned four sugar plantations in Jamaica and he used some of the profits to develop the ...”

“... We talk about voices, beards and great moon-faced Welsh actors. He has been to the Galápagos with Richard Dawkins. I almost ask, why? He says if Shakespeare had been born on a beach we would never have had the plays. Well, we would have, but they would all be called things like Pleasure Hammock.I twist around and see Hope making friends with a ...”

“... and Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of druggy, trippy, sci-fi – just the boy’s ...”

“... in reductio ad Hitlerum as he bears witness to what’s going on in the megachurches: viewers of Richard Dawkins’s documentary The Root of All Evil? might remember his opening salvo against a pre-scandal Ted Haggard, in which Dawkins said that a New Life Church service reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies. (Haggard ...”

“... is not built into human anatomy but is a cultural development. He puts this point in terms of Richard Dawkins’s notion of ‘memes’. Dawkins defines a meme as a kind of replicator – analogous to a gene or a crystal. This kind of replicator is a ‘pattern of information that can thrive only in brains or the ...”

“... The technical problems, Atran likes to think, are overwhelming. A remark by the US physicist Richard Garwin, worth bearing in mind in case this ever changes: ‘Although a country would not be destroyed by such an explosion, it could ruin itself by its reaction.’ More generally, Atran believes that sacred values are not convertible. When Jewish ...”