Alex Di I'd like to state first of all that I'm an atheist myself. An atheist to the bone, one might say. I'm also a bit of an adept in science. And on the top of that I was raised to be an Orthodox Christian, and was faithful right until, as George Carlin would have said, reaching my age of reason. I've seen best and worst both worlds have to offer.If you study the history of how any typical religion starts you would most likely stumble upon two major reasons. The first one is that a human brain is a tricky thing, it needs answers and if it doesn't receive them it constructs them. We can only partially behold the world, even now with technologies of adaptive optics and tunneling microscopy we only see a small piece of what the universe has to offer. But we are on the right path, we observe and we draw conclusions, we make simplified models, because the universe is too complex to account for all the factors. We create theories and try to disprove them to reject them or strengthen them. A theory is indeed not a law, it's a sum of our observations and logical conclusions these observations lead to. As the time goes by our understanding is being refined by ever emerging new theories that are deeper and more general than the previous ones.Then there's a second type of religious origin. One that that you may call "evil". The need of control. A cop in the sky that watches our every move and punishes us if we have a thought of sleeping with our neighbor. Why? Because the Bible, Torah, Koran said so! Do you dare question the holy book? Do you dare defy the authoritarian man with the hat? Most monotheistic religions started as an instrument of control. Indoctrination since the early years, complete obedience, punishment for a free thought.I can understand why pagan religions started. It was an initial quest for knowledge. A "proto theory" if you may. What I cannot condone though is the cause of monotheism, a two-faced brainwashing machine. I have seen how the religion is being misused by countless people in my faithful days. But you don't even need that to understand it. Look at the holy crusades, inquisitions, holy jihad, and more recent Israeli-Palestinian conflict and children being molested by the clergy. Monotheistic forms of religion are hypocritical and are used for one thing only: completing personal agenda through the cost of human sacrifice. The ends truly justify the means.On the "documentary". The interviews were rushed and weren't prepared properly. It's what I would call a "blitzkrieg-interviewing". He had no arguments to present to the people he was confronting. All he had was a grudge against religion. It backfired, those people had come from that conversation even more faithful, and Richard Dawkins had come out from it even more of a fool. He was mumbling about "mountains of evidence" and how he "believes in a theory". That's the second greatest flaw with this film. Nobody believes in science, the whole point of science is being skeptical to the end. The only way to know if the theory is reasonable is to get results out of it. See that it works. Airplanes fly, computers calculate and radio stations broadcast because of scientific theories working. Not because we believe in them. That really is the main reason for me to accept that science is the right way to go. It works. Hell, if Jesus could turn water into wine before my eyes and feed thousands with a pair of fishes, I'd be faithful till the rest of my days. But faith doesn't make our combustion engines perform, hydrocarbons do.Let's point out one of the major hypocrisies of the whole "religion versus science" war. The religious center at the beginning of the film looked quite advanced to me. Would it not be less hypocritical to make a church lit by candles instead of a heavy metal concert arena? Richard also forgot to point out many internal contradictions in the statements of various characters in the movie.The "documentary" is so incoherent and disjointed, void of structure, arguments and facts and at some points it even seemed to me almost like a blind crusade against religion itself, rather than a rational approach. I would agree on three things with Mr. Dawkins though. Religion and science are incompatible, because they lye on the opposite sides of the spectrum. Whilst religion demands faith, science could not be science without a great deal of skepticism. That religion is indeed a virus. Children really do believe everything they're told. And so you can easily sell them all various flavors of BS. And that if you're being selective in religion, you probably should abandon it altogether. Why believe some things, but not the others? It is true that times change and that religion needs to be interpreted differently in this day and age than its origins. But that's the religion's greatest flaw: there is too much room for interpretations. There are no general truths, you can distort it any way you like. So what's the use of it then?Humanity had long since outgrown religion. Every human being is the master of his or her own fate. We don't need a savior, we don't need salvation. We need ratio (Latin for reason) above everything else. We don't kill because we don't want the same to happen to us. Morals are not dictated by religion, they're part of our genes. And every war should be fought with solid arguments and facts, rather than with arms and hatred. It's just too bad Richard Dawkins couldn't see that, despite claiming of being rational. In his blind hate towards religion he forgot what being rational means, and ultimately became a zealot himself. A new kind of zealot, but a zealot none the less.

TBJCSKCNRRQTreviews This is a 90-minutes documentary that examines and challenges religion. It covers an impressive amount, addressing Judaism, Islam, Christianity and Catholicism, without any of them being glossed over. It raises questions that have to be asked, and makes remarkable points. The aggressive and uncompromising way of more than one of the groups should not be ignored. Like The Enemies of Reason, this has disturbing material. This is put together of footage taken from the various areas(including famous sites) that writer Dawkins visited in making this and interviews with people from both sides, several of which are specifically known for their views on the subjects. This is more confrontational and impassioned than the later-produced, aforementioned piece, and this is sure to offend some. I don't think that is as much the intent as a side-effect... I would say that Richard means to provoke exploration, reflection, independent, free thought. I doubt he is particularly likely to go for shock value. The subject matter does perhaps make for more emotional responses, what with the deeply personal nature of it. Richard Dawkins asks great questions, and argues impeccably well. Not always equally respectful, but invariably eloquently and intelligently. I recommend this to any skeptic, and anyone in general who is willing to hear him out. 8/10

jono_day01 I would like to make it very clear that I am not at all religious. I am an atheist but I could see that Richard Dorkins was contradicting himself over and over again. I would also like to make it known that I am not the sort of person that argues against something with philosophy all the time, but I feel that when comparing science and religion we must be philosophical and be willing to question the belief in main stream science as well as questioning religious beliefs.I wonder if Richard Dorkins ever spends any time to think philosophically about belief, anyone who thinks long and hard enough about science and religion will realise that science is indeed a religion in itself. Yes there is a fundamental difference between the way that scientific beliefs are held when compared with other religions, but at it's roots, it's faith in a particular human instinct.Throughout this series, Richard insists that science methods are the only right way of thinking and that it makes sense to believe in something only if the evidence for it is strong enough. If you dig deep enough into how science functions you'll realise that it is just as irrational as religion and that it comes down to faith in the end, faith in the evidence, faith in our sanity, faith in our senses but more than anything else faith in our instinct to follow patterns of recurrence.This is not easy to explain but think about how the laws of physics were decided, it was because they were and still are the most common patterns of recurrence that we are aware of. I think that human beings have an instinct that makes them believe that the longer something remains in a certain state or place of existence the more we just assume out of blind FAITH that it is more likely to stay like it. For example, we don't expect that gravity will suddenly work in reverse tomorrow, by this I mean pushing matter away as supposed to attracting it. But the only reason why we don't expect this sudden change is because we have known for so long that it has always attracted as far as we are aware. However that doesn't mean that it couldn't do exactly the reverse tomorrow or even right now. It doesn't matter how long something may stay in a certain state or change, there is no rational reason to make assumptions about it but we do out of instinct. I would ask you to consider what is a long and short amount of time? There is no such thing, I don't know exactly how long it took for these supposed wise men to decide that everything must be made out of matter, Sound, Light, etc but lets give them what they would consider to be an edge way! Lets say far longer than it really was 12,00000000000 years! Is that a long period of time? 99999999999999999 years makes 12,00000000000 years seem like an incredibly short period of time. For all we know there could be an extreme amount of change in the so called laws of science within the next trillion years. It's all about comparison, only when we compare things can we say "that is long" or that is short. It's the same with big and small, wide and thin, heavy and light, strong and weak and others.I doubt that any scientist could tell me why they think that trusting this instinct makes sense. I certainly don't see why it should, but that doesn't mean that we as humanity should necessarily stop using it. With this in mind, the most hypocritical comment that Richard Dorkins made was when he said that faith is irrational, "a process of non thinking" he said. If what we have in this instinct that I've been describing and this instinct that we all possess on some level isn't faith then I don't know what the hell it is. Other times when he is being hypocritical is when he talks about the religions being bronze age, "bronze age myths" he says. I would like to point out that no matter how much scientific methods have been changed over the years due to experience, experiments and evaluating, the pure rules of science are getting older and older all the time! They could even be described as the holy bible of science. He was going on about how he is sick of the different religions being stubborn " I am right, he is wrong" but looking back on how rude he was to the various interviewees, he seems to be just as stubborn him self. To be fair to him, at least he doesn't try to bomb religious communities. I appreciate his hatred for certain religious beliefs that generate war, but I don't respect his arrogance in his own beliefs.As far as I'm concerned, Richard has the right to believe in science if that is his way. I am scientifically minded as well, but I don't think he has the right to go up to religious leaders having unfriendly arguments, trying to force his opinion on to them and virtually describing them as stupid. Despite all his education, experience and discoveries he seems to fail to have the wisdom to properly question his very own system of belief. I have read what he says in defence of this argument that open minded atheists such as my self put forward, What he states suggests to me that he is totally missing the point.Finally the title of the documentary, Root Of All Evil. This states that religion is the root of all evil, it isn't true. There are causes of evil that have nothing to do with religion.All round the documentary series was frustrating, narrow minded, hypocritical and flat-out rubbish.

viamund It's about time that somebody made a documentary like this. All religions are the same - foolish superstition -. Do these people actually believe that their holy books and myths were written by divine supernatural pan-dimensional beings? There were written by Human Beings not unlike themselves. There is no longer any purpose for these superstitions. They have no redeeming qualities - unless fear, shame, lies, intolerance and hatred are your ideas of good qualities -. God is dead... it's about time. Try having faith in Humankind instead because that's the only way things get done. Vapid religions succeed in creating hate, praise Mankind instead