Richard Dawkins is my Hero.

OK, it's time it was said, nowadays the public idolise people who run around playing games and sports, calling them heroes and stars and worthy of adulation.
You are playing a damn game...go have fun, show us how good you are, but don't expect us to treat you like kings and queens for taking recreation to a higher level.

You wanna know who I idolise and look up to? People who make me think. People who make us all think. People who find cures for diseases, people who open new doors of science and who show us the wonder and beauty of the world and the universe on any scale from the flagellar motor of a bacteria to the large scale layout of a galaxy or a supernova.
These are the people who need our adulation, need our funding, and need our respect. I still long to see a serious T-shirt saying something about a scientific discovery.

Lately, as I have been sitting in my locomotive cabin waiting for the train to load, I have been reading a lot. The book have read twice lately is "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins.

Here is a man who is making us think, making us consider that there just might be something a little odd about blindly believing in an imaginary friend in the sky who at any moment might chuck a hissy fit and strike down a city of men, women, and children dead in a moment.
As Professor Dawkins says in his fine book, the people who believe in the literal truth of the bible have most likely never read the whole damn thing.
I have read the Bible twice...the second time I read it because I couldn't believe half of what I had read the first time through. The joke labels are you can print out to paste on bibles at the library are absolutely true: the labels say "Parental warning: contains violence, sex, nudity, incest, genocide, murder, rape, slavery, and occult themes".
If we are to take the literal truth of the Bible, the God of the Old Testament is a ruthless, egomaniacal, psychopathic, capricious lunatic who only requires your total and complete adulation, or he will do something nasty to you, your family, your dog, and your entire civilisation if he is really pissed off.

I should point out that I was a good boy and went to Sunday school, went to church each week (although when I was small, I do recall it was to play quietly with the Matchbox SuperKing Ford wagon that our neighbor used to bring in the pocket of his suit...that little shelf behind the pew really came in handy.) I was even a member of the Presbeterian Order Of Knights,
My "conversion" came at a time I can recall even to this day. I had always been a science nut, absorbing every book and article I could find. My highest marks were in science and physics at school, and I loved astronomy as well. My parents, to thier eternal credit, never pushed any kind of religious extremism on me or tried to dissuade me from my enthusiam for science and evolution. I seem to have grown up with a pretty firm moral base even though I was never a bible-thumping christian soldier.

In 1982, I was 17 years old and a member of a Presbeterian youth group...at one of these meetings, my outlook on religion was to change. Truth be told, me and most of the other guys there were in it for the pretty girls, friendship, outings, and to show off our hot cars.
There used to be a prayer each week, and sometimes bible lessons which were mostly harmless. One evening, as we were sitting around talking about some bible story, one of the girls mentioned that they had visited a national park where they were shown aboriginal paintings. They were told that they were around 25,000 years old. I merely nodded, but then came the words which changed my outlook. This pretty, clear headed, and otherwise intelligent girl then said "But of course we just giggle and knew that couldn't be right". I was puzzled, and asked why. She looked me right in the eye and said "Well, we all know the Earth is only 6000 years old, so those painting can't be that old."
In that instant, my brain gave a little jolt...I was honestly stunned and lost for words...I stammered out a reply, saying "Umm...yes it is...they carbon date stuff found there and work out the age." I still didn;t really grasp what she was saying...her sister chimed in to agree, and several others around the circle all nodded blindly in agreement.
Then one of the others said, "Carbon dating doesn't work...do you know they killed a seal once near a science place in Canada and carbon dated it to see how old it was, and it said it was over 300 years old?".
Now, at that time, I didn't know enough about the little details of carbon dating to know that an error of 300 years is nothing...when you are dating stuff hundreds of thousands of years old, 300 years is nothing. Then again, I might have been aware, but I was too stunned to use it as a comeback.

That was the turning point...I knew then that here was a group of people who I was firm friends with, who were educated, intelligent people, a couple who had been my girlfriends, yet I knew nothing about them.
They were based in a world view that meant that they believed the world was younger than some of the Bristlecone Pine trees, younger than the domestication of the dog, and only a little older than the pyramids.

Now I know to look at the truth and beauty of the world around me, to look into the stars through my telescope and know that some of those stars I look at have light which left while mankind was living in caves, and that all the animals and plants we see are related all the way back to a common ancestor, down a long chain of evolution and a series of trial and error, with the fittest surviving.

Use your brains, people, and read a damn book...start with The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins...