I'm having a great time reading The God Delusion. It was a bit boring in the middle when Dawkins was talking about evolution of religion, why the anthropic principle doesn't prove God's existence, and why God's supposed omnipotence and omnipresence also implies that he doesn't exist. But now he's talking about morality, which is really interesting. I've always been told that an atheistic society will decline into immorality. Dawkins does a very good job of showing the separation of morality and religion, and how morality and ethics are beneficial (evolutionarily-speaking). One way he puts it is to think about how morals and ethics have changed over time, leading to more gender and racial equality. But if morality is based on religion, which is based on a document (or set of documents) that hasn't changed in a couple thousand years, morality shouldn't change over time. This change occurs because religion and morality are separate sets of memes.

I just finished reading a great section about something I've come across as a scientist, and I've seen it from other scientists, even at conferences. Dawkins tells the story of Kurt Wise, who runs the Center for Origins Research. Kurt was set to become an outstanding geologist. He got his graduate degree from Harvard under Stephen Jay Gould. But Kurt was raised as a fundamentalist Christian, and realized that there were contradictions between the Bible and what he studied at graduate school. Fed up with the internal conflict, he sat down with his Bible and cut out (with a pair of scissors) all the passages that disagree with the current scientific worldview. Needless to say his Bible was a shambles afterwards. At that point he made a choice, either "Science" or God, and he chose God...

"It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science."

He could have taken the Bible as an allegory or symbolic text, as many do. But this is what fundamentalism does to people. It causes people to ignore scientific evidence. It causes people to want to be dumb!