The God Delusion (2006)

I started this because I'm a huge RD fan, as well as a committed and outspoken atheist; sadly, it's just a rant, and rather poorly (and pointlessly) reasoned. Though I am seriously stunned and often worried at religious obsession in the US and the lack of scientific understanding, I still think RD should just stick to writing his amazing, ground-breaking, literate and readable books about evolution. Religious freaks, or even moderately religious normal people, are not going to be convinced by his, or in fact any, "arguments" against God (just as there is no "argument" or reasoning that is going to make me believe in any sort of supernatural agent or being)--it's just preaching to the choir; i think it's better to accept that religion is a whole different paradigm and work on eradicating prejudice and fundamentalism in all its forms, not just religious (or read Daniel Dennett, who is at least a better philosopher).

Certainly 5 stars for the message and the approach to debunking religious arguments throughout the ages of all types; I only knock it down a bit for its length and dragging a bit in a couple of places. Dawkins focuses on Christianity because this is his background, but his arguments are not confined to it. He absolutely does not pull any punches, but at the same time writes in a thoughtful, humanizing, and playful way. The book is also chock-full of quotes :), starting with Douglas Adams, In Memoriam, in the dedication: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Others:
On atheism:
“I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.”

On belief in the irrational, from Sam Harris:
“We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them ‘religious’; otherwise, they are likely to be called ‘mad’, ‘psychotic’, or ‘delusional’ … Clearly there is a sanity in numbers.”

On belief as a virtue:
“But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What’s so special about believing? Isn’t it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn’t the designer of the universe have to be a scientist?”

On the Bible, the Old Testament:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

“The point is that, whether true or not, the Bible is held up to us as the source of our morality. And the Bible story of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler’s invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein’s massacres of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs.”

And this on the New Testament:
“Robert Gillooly shows how all the essential features of the Jesus legend, including the star in the east, the virgin birth, the veneration of the baby by kings, the miracles, the execution, the resurrection and the ascension are borrowed – every last one of them – from other religions already in existence in the Mediterranean and Near East region.”

“Well, there’s no denying that, from a moral point of view, Jesus is a huge improvement over the cruel ogre of the Old Testament. Indeed, Jesus, if he existed (or whoever wrote his script if he didn’t) was surely one of the great ethical innovators of history. The Sermon on the Mount is way ahead of its time. His ‘turn the other cheek’ anticipated Gandhi and Martin Luther King by two thousand years.”

Lastly this, on the Apocrypha:
“The gospels that didn’t make it were omitted by those ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were even more embarrassingly implausible than those in the four canonical ones. The Infant Gospel of Thomas, for example, has numerous anecdotes about the child Jesus abusing his magical powers in the manner of a mischievous fairy, impishly transforming his playmates into goats, or turning mud into sparrows, or giving his father a hand with the carpentry by miraculously lengthening a piece of wood.”

Finally, from John Hartung:
“The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty, and rape. Many ancient words do that – the Iliad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling the Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their lives. And it is, by far, the world’s all-time best seller.”

On death:
“Why don’t all Christians and Muslims say something like the abbot [Congratulations!] when they hear that a friend is dying? When a devout woman is told by a doctor that she has only months to live, why doesn’t she beam with excited anticipation, as if she has just won a holiday in the Seychelles?”

On God:
“Why is God considered an explanation for anything? It’s not – it’s a failure to explain, a shrug of the shoulders, an ‘I dunno’ dressed up in spirituality and ritual. If someone credits something to God, generally what it means is that they haven’t a clue, so they’re attributing it to an unreachable, unknowable sky-fairy. Ask for an explanation of where that bloke came from, and odds are you’ll get a vague, pseudo-philosophical reply about having always existed, or being outside nature. Which, of course, explains nothing.”

On hell:
“If hell were plausible, it would only have to be moderately unpleasant in order to deter. Given that it is so unlikely to be true, it has to be advertised as very very scary indeed, to balance its implausibility and retain some deterrence value.”

On love, hmm interesting this found its way in here:
“The anthropologist Helen Fisher, in Why We Love, has beautifully expressed the insanity of romantic love, and how over-the-top it is compared with what might seem strictly necessary. Look at it this way. From the point of view of a man, say, it is unlikely that any one woman of his acquaintance is a hundred times more lovable than her nearest competitor, yet that is how he is likely to describe her when ‘in love’. Rather than the fanatically monogamous devotion to which we are susceptible, some sort of ‘polyamory’ is on the face of it more rational. (Polyamory is the belief that one can simultaneously love several members of the opposite sex, just as one can love more than one wine, composer, book, or sport.) We happily accept that we can love more than one child, parent, sibling, teacher, friend, or pet. When you think of it like that, isn’t the total exclusiveness that we expect of spousal love positively weird?”

On misogyny, from Gore Vidal:
“The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal – God is the Omnipotent Father – hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.”

On prayer, from Ambrose Bierce:
“(The definition of to pray is) to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.”

On religion’s use of science, and the double standard:
“…imagine, by some remarkable set of circumstances, that forensic archaeologists unearthed DNA evidence to show that Jesus really did lack a biological father. Can you imagine religious apologists shrugging their shoulders and saying anything remotely like the following? ‘Who cares? Scientific evidence is completely irrelevant to theological questions. Wrong magisterium! We’re concerned only with ultimate questions and with moral values. Neither DNA nor any other scientific evidence could ever have any bearing on the matter, one way or the other.’ The very idea is a joke.”

More on religion, from Thomas Jefferson:
“The priests of the different religious sects … dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.”

Also from Thomas Jefferson:
“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

From Steven Weinberg:
“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”

From Seneca the Younger:
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

From Victor Hugo:
“There is in every village a torch – the teacher: and an extinguisher – the clergyman.”

From Muriel Gray, on the terrorism of the London bombings:
“Everyone is being blamed, from the obvious villainous duo of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, to the inaction of Muslim ‘communities’. But it has never been clearer that there is only one place to lay the blame and it has ever been thus. The cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror, and ignorance is of course religion itself, and if it seems ludicrous to have to state such an obvious reality, the fact is that the government and the media are doing a pretty good job of pretending that it isn’t so.”

And:
“Our Western politicians avoid mentioning the R word (religion), and instead characterize their battle as a war against ‘terror’, as though terror were a kind of spirit or force, with a will and a mind of its own. Or they characterize terrorists as motivated by pure ‘evil’. But they are not motivated by evil. However misguided we may think them, they are motivated, like the Christian murderers of abortion doctors, by what they perceive to be righteousness, faithfully pursuing what their religion tells them. They are not psychotic; they are religious idealists, who, by their own lights, are rational.”

On being a spiritual nonbeliever, something I have always felt:
From Einstein:
“I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”

Also from Einstein:
“I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”

Lastly, this little bit of levity, from Lord Justice Bowen, a play of course on Matthew 5:45:
“The rain it raineth on the just,
And also on the unjust fella.
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.” ( )

Not half as dogmatic as everyone makes out and about twice as smart and clearly laid-out as most. Recommend (and will reread before forming an actual opinion). ( )

This one is still sitting on my shelf with a pen in it...waiting to be finished. ( )