Religion is a Mental Illness

"I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct. If God works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"The earliest surviving account of the flood legend was written down in Mesopotamia 1,000 years before it was retold as the story of Noah in the Old Testament. So, you could say Gilgamesh fulfilled his quest for immortality." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters.

I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct.

If god works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal."

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

Moyers: Do you give people who make this case, that that was the beginning and that there had to be something that provoked the beginning, do you give them an A at least for trying to reconcile faith and reason?

Tyson: I don’t think they’re reconcilable.

Moyers: What do you mean?

Tyson: Well, so let me say that differently. All efforts that have been invested by brilliant people of the past have failed at that exercise. They just fail. And so I don’t, the track record is so poor that going forward, I have essentially zero confidence, near zero confidence, that there will be fruitful things to emerge from the effort to reconcile them.

So, for example, if you knew nothing about science, and you read, say, the Bible, the Old Testament, which in Genesis, is an account of nature, that’s what that is, and I said to you, give me your description of the natural world based only on this, you would say the world was created in six days, and that stars are just little points of light much lesser than the sun. And that in fact, they can fall out of the sky, right, because that’s what happens during the Revelation.

You know, one of the signs that the second coming, is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on Earth. To even write that means you don’t know what those things are. You have no concept of what the actual universe is. So everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe based on Bible passages got the wrong answer.

So what happened was, when science discovers things, and you want to stay religious, or you want to continue to believe that the Bible is unerring, what you would do is you would say, “Well, let me go back to the Bible and reinterpret it.” Then you’d say things like, “Oh, well they didn’t really mean that literally. They meant that figuratively.”

So, this whole sort of reinterpretation of the, how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are came after science showed that this is not how things unfolded. And so the educated religious people are perfectly fine with that. It’s the fundamentalists who want to say that the Bible is the literally, literal truth of God, that and want to see the Bible as a science textbook, who are knocking on the science doors of the schools, trying to put that content in the science room. Enlightened religious people are not behaving that way. So saying that science is cool, we’re good with that, and use the Bible for, to get your spiritual enlightenment and your emotional fulfillment.

Moyers: Do you have any sympathy for people who seem to only feel safe in the vastness of the universe you describe in your show if they can infer a personal God who makes it more hospitable to them, who cares for them?

Tyson: In this, what we tell ourselves is a free country, which means you should have freedom of thought, I don't care what you think. I just don't. Go think whatever you want. Go ahead. Think that there is one God, two gods, ten gods, or no gods. That is what it means to live in a free country. The problem arises is if you have a religious philosophy that is not based in objective realities, that you then want to put into the science classroom. Then I am going to stand there and say no I am not going to allow you in the science classroom. I am not telling you what to think. I am just telling you in the science classroom you are not doing science. This is not science. Keep it out. That is when I stand up. Otherwise, go ahead. I am not telling you how to think.

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.

There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.

Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ

"Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance."

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”

-- Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“We do not simply live in this universe.

The universe lives within us.”

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

“The problem in society is not kids not knowing science. The problem is adults not knowing science. They outnumber kids 5 to 1, they wield power, they write legislation.

When you have scientifically illiterate adults, you have undermined the very fabric of what makes a nation wealthy and strong.”

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.”

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"If your personal beliefs deny what's objectively true about the world, then they're more accurately called personal delusions.”

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"It's okay not to know all the answers; it's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there."

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

"People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs.

This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers."

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Letter to the Editor”, New York Times, published December 21, 2006.

"Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion."

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"People turn to religion not to be informed, but to be massaged. It tells them what they want to hear, not what they need to know. Only one discipline exists to inform the human mind and to expand human knowledge, and that discipline is science."

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson