Darwin realized that successful mutations are nearly always small. But the mutations that scientists study are usually large, for the obvious reason that small ones are hard to detect.
When people say they are atheists they don’t mean they can prove that there are no gods. Strictly speaking, it’s impossible to prove that something does not exist.
The long gap between Jesus’s death and the gospels being written gives us one reason to doubt that they are a reliable guide to history. Another is that they contradict each other.
Another thing that worries historians is that there are hardly any mentions of Jesus in histories outside the gospels.
The great American author Mark Twain is supposed to have said: ‘A lie can spread half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.’
No serious scholar today thinks the gospels were written by eye-witnesses, and all agree that even Mark, the oldest of the four gospels, was written about 35 or 40 years after the death of Jesus.
A simple translation error spawned the entire worldwide myth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Roman Catholic cult of Mary as a kind of goddess, the ‘Queen of Heaven’.
If one of them is right, why should it be the belief that you happen to have inherited in the country where you were born? You don’t have to be very sarcastic to think something like this: ‘Isn’t it remarkable that almost every child follows the same religion as their parents, and it always just happens to be the right religion!’
The doctrine of atonement, which Christians take very seriously indeed, is so deeply, deeply nasty that it deserves to be savagely ridiculed.
Winston Churchill said: ‘History will be kind to me. I intend to write it!’
The notion of a cosmic war of good versus evil probably comes from Zoroastrianism, an early religion founded by the Persian prophet Zoroaster, which influenced the Abrahamic religions.