Interview w/Richard Dawkins: Religion is a virus

"Darwin realized that natural selection produces cruel results. He looked at predators and prey, parasites and hosts, and saw how there is an immense amount of suffering and cruelty out there in nature. He also realized that that was a logical consequence of his theory. The beauty and elegance of living things is produced as a result of a thoroughly unpleasant, cruel process--this constant winnowing, generation after generation, of animals and plants.
The point of my essay [Rebelling Against Our Selfish Genes: humans must believe in evolution, but fight it; through us, natural selection has blundered unwittingly into its own negation] is that we humans can escape from that, because our brains, which have evolved to a large size as a result of this very same process, are big enough to emancipate from the process that gave rise to them. They can set up new goals, new purposes that are not directly related to natural selection at all.
We can seek more altruistic, sympathetic, artistic things that have nothing to do with the preservation of our selfish genes--and thank goodness we can. . . .
It would be paradise on earth. What I hope for is a world ruled by enlightened rationality, which does not mean something dull, but something of high artistic value. I just wish there were the slightest chance of it ever happening."