The one where some Aussie uses a naughty word

Dr. Dawkins speaks in Australia

I grew up in a home where only one person was allowed to be outspoken, and that one was defiantly religious. Any questioning or opposition to the evangelical cause was met with ridicule, scorn, screeching hatred, a flat hand to the side of the face, or a combination of any or all of these.

Religion cannot stand criticism for obvious reasons. It has no foundation. It has no solid composition. It exists only in the minds of people who simply choose to believe things that someone else has presented to them, whether they be presented face to face or presented in some medium like literature or a broadcast. To criticize religion then is to criticize the very minds of the religious. Nobody likes his intelligence questioned or her logical fallacies pointed out, but since religion is not intelligently defensible and it is fundamentally illogical, there really is no choice in the matter.

We have witnessed with our own eyes how religion can make people deranged. It can lead to the murder of physicians in women's clinics because some religion believes that a zygote is a human being. It can lead to the spread of incurable diseases because some religion believes that sex for pleasure, even with one's own wife, is a sin. It can convince uneducated men to commit murder-suicide because some religion believes killing non-believers is a virtue. And the religious always respond with, "But those are the extremists!" No, they aren't. These are the people who simply believe what their religion tells them and act upon it in good faith. They are not wild-eyed crazies; they are the faithful.

The so-called "new" atheists are speaking plainly and adamantly in the uphill struggle to help lift the world from the dark ages of religion. We ought not be children afraid of the terrors of life. We have no business reaching our arms to the sky hoping that some superman might intervene in our distress great or small. The evils of earth are our own doing, not superman's. That knowledge alone should compel each of us to awake from the slumber of religion's mind-numbing narcotic and lend our hands to the work of repair that lies before us.