Susan Blackmore - Personal Life

Personal Life

Blackmore is an active practitioner of Zen, although she identifies herself as "not a Buddhist". Blackmore is an atheist who has criticised religion sharply, having said, for instance, that "all kinds of infectious memes thrive in religions, in spite of being false, such as the idea of a creator god, virgin births, the subservience of women, transubstantiation, and many more. In the major religions, they are backed up by admonitions to have faith not doubt, and by untestable but ferocious rewards and punishments."

On 15 September 2010, Blackmore, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian, stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK. On 16 September 2010, Blackmore wrote in The Guardian that she no longer believed that religion is a maladaptive by-product of consciousness ("virus of the mind") but is evolutionarily adaptive.

She is married to the writer Adam Hart-Davis.

Blackmore was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome in 1995.

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