The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

[howard male]

I don't think it's likely to unconvert someone like your neighbour either, Charlie, but not because it isn't perfectly designed to do so. As Dawkins himself points out, he is the exact opposite to a fanatic in his measured and analytical approach to his subject.

The bottom line is if someone proved tomorrow that evolution was a false hypothesis and that God made us all afterall, Dawkins would accept he was wrong - that is the opposite of being a fanatic.

The faithful are, by definition, immovable in their faith - that is the essential tragedy of mankind. But the very anger your neighbour displayed at least suggests that Dawkins touched a nerve and so therefore is seen as a threat to religion - otherwise why get so angry? It's just someone else's opinion.

But I do think this book - and other such books - will make a difference slowly. But only to the already doubting. I honestly believe we have a finite future unless organised religion is put in its place as an anachronism and a danger. We fret about reusing plastic bags and wiping our bottoms with recycled loo paper, while the biggest danger to our future gets treated with kid gloves.

I have no problem with people having or developing a personal relationship with whatever they perceive God to be, but aligning yourself with these corrupt organisations and taking their man-made books as moral instruction manuals, has never shown itself to be a good idea and never will.

[Con Murphy]

A God-fearing neighbour who saw it on our sitting room table went nearly purple with anger, saying he thought Dawkins was as fanatical and intolerant in his non-believing as any fundamentalist religious zealot.

Yes, that’s my (agnostic-atheistic) worry. I haven’t read The God Delusion (yet), but I do like Dawkins’ earlier books like The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. They are articulate, erudite, but above all explanatory without being preachy. Just going by the title of his latest book, my worry is that he is simultaneously preaching to the converted and alienating those whose views he is more than capable of challenging. I’d be very interested to know if this seemingly new confrontational Dawkins has actually changed minds in the way that the persuasive Dawkins did in the past.

As for Christopher Hitchens: it’s no surprise to see him jump on the bandwagon. It reminds me of my younger, more radical days when we all sat around reading left-wing tracts that confirmed us in our prejudices – yes it’s great to find people clever enough to articulate your ideological intransigence, but if they aren’t reaching out to the supposed enemy, it becomes nothing better than an intellectual circle-jerk. I read an interview with Hitchens (sorry, no link, can’t remember the publication) in which he was challenged about the claim that all war is caused by religion with the example of the millions of deaths caused by the two great irreligious monsters of the 20th Century, Hitler and Stalin. To which his reply was to describe Communism and Fascism as “secularised religionâ€

[howard male]

Con wrote -

As for Christopher Hitchens: it’s no surprise to see him jump on the bandwagon.

Hitchins' book is heartfelt and passionate - not at all the work of a bandwagon jumper. I think the arrival of these books one after the other is more to do with the zeitgeist than any attempts to cash in. I mean, think about it - a book takes at least a year to write so Hitchens must having been working on his book before Darkins' book materialised (in fact Hitchens himself says in his intoduction that he's been writing this book for most of his life.) The distinction between the two books in a nutshell is, a was moved by Hitchens' and persuaded by Dawkins. But both should be read.

As for the Communism, Fascism comment - no argument can be summed up in two words but having read the man's book I do understand what he means by 'secularised religion' though he under played his argument by not also pointing out that many of Hitler's men (and arguably Hitler himself) were practising Catholics. And the Catholic church happily provided parish records on all of Germany's population so that Hitler and Co could sort the wheat from the chaff and thereby bring about one of the worst crimes of the 20th Century.

[Con Murphy]

Isn't it great to have Howard back?

Con wrote -

As for Christopher Hitchens: it’s no surprise to see him jump on the bandwagon.

Hitchins' book is heartfelt and passionate - not at all the work of a bandwagon jumper.

Fair enough, I'm probably doing him an injustice, but I didn't really mean the Dawkins bandwagon so much as the atheist-zealot one that (understandably) has been on a bit of a roll over the last few years.

As for the Communism, Fascism comment - no argument can be summed up in two words but having read the man's book I do understand what he means by 'secularised religion' though he under played his argument by not also pointing out that many of Hitler's men (and arguably Hitler himself) were practising Catholics.

To be fair, doing so would have stretched the credibility of his argument. You can’t really ascribe theistic religious ideology to a movement that you are calling a secular “religionâ€

[howard male]

Con wrote -

Yes, many members of the Catholic Church unforgivably colluded with the Nazis. So did many French farmers. So are we going to blame the worst crime of the 20th Century on the agrarian revolution?

French farmers were individuals with families whose safety they must have feared for - their collusion can be understood even if it's not forgiven. The Catholic church is a powerful monolithic organisation with responsibilities to the population and - supposedly - a higher moral purpose!

[Con Murphy]

My last post on the subject, I promise, with apologies for labouring over an example that might be very sensitive for many people.

Con wrote -

Yes, many members of the Catholic Church unforgivably colluded with the Nazis. So did many French farmers. So are we going to blame the worst crime of the 20th Century on the agrarian revolution?

French farmers were individuals with families whose safety they must have feared for - their collusion can be understood even if it's not forgiven. The Catholic church is a powerful monolithic organisation with responsibilities to the population and - supposedly - a higher moral purpose!

I’m not disputing that – I am lapsed after all! Where I am at odds with Christopher Hitchens and his ilk is when the reprehensible actions of just one religious group are brought into an argument as a means to ‘prove’ that religion is solely to blame for the evil acts that resulted (and if that fails, describing it as a secular religion anyway as a get-out). It smacks of the need to fashion facts around an argument (typical ex-Troskyite!), especially when moral equivalence is added to the equation. It just won’t wash. Religion is the mechanism and/or the excuse for many evil acts (it’s far and away the biggest and most pervasive, I would argue), but it’s not the cause of them. That honour belongs to mankind. To use the other example, Stalin didn’t need imagined gods to justify genocide, nor does Robert Mugabe now, and neither will future madmen even if we did finally rid ourselves of organised religion. To suggest otherwise is a sign of zealotry in my opinion, because religion appears to have become the enemy, not the acts that are perpetrated in its name.

[garth cartwright]

i have read neither the Dawkins or Hitchens book and have no intention of doing so: Hitchens i find especially offensive, a literary bootboy, Julie Burchill on steroids. A writer who does interest me is English philosopher John Gray and i thought his comments on fundamentalist athieists from last week's Guardian Review might be of interest to this debate:

Gray supplies a gloss: religion, supposedly banished from western thought, has returned in a perverted form as a black mass of political and scientific myths. He is especially hard on evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who believe "that you can radically alter the world by altering people's beliefs, that conflicts in the world come from people's beliefs. I think instead they come from conflicts in humans' needs, including the needs for food and water. And oil. The idea that you can cleanse the world of evil by converting everybody to or from something is a very Christian idea. The psychological and metaphysical needs that used to be satisfied in faith are not repressed any more than sexual needs were in Puritan culture. I have no religious beliefs, but one of the things about the religious traditions of Europe and the west is that they've been constantly mocked and challenged. So they understand that their beliefs are problematic and semi-mythical. Most religious thinkers realise - some creationists don't - that their faiths are not alternative scientific theories, but something different, whereas Dawkins, Dennett, and others are ruled by myths that they've never interrogated. But they all go bananas when you say that."

Gray, one suspects, likes to make Dawkins go bananas. He is a natural contrarian. Surely, though, Dawkins isn't a crypto-Christian? "You'd think not." But, reading The God Delusion, Gray found in it the following sentence: "We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." Gray writes: "In affirming human uniqueness in this way, Dawkins relies on a Christian world-view." Gray also attacks Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great. "One thing I've noticed is that evangelical atheists have an extraordinary capacity for blind faith. I can't imagine Pascal making the kind of grotesque error that Hitchens has made over the Iraq war."

[Adam Blake]

Civilisation is only two hot meals deep: When the population of a "civilised" country have to go without two hot meals in a row because there is no food, the guys with guns start robbing the guys without guns. That's got nothing to do with religion.

I hate Dawkins and all who sail in him (sorry Howard, but I do), especially that four letter fart Pullman who thinks he's so damned clever for making untold millions by ripping off chunks of Dante, Milton and weaving it together with J.K.Rowling in order to impress his oh-so-enlightened anti-Christian bullshit on a credulous populace starved to death of any kind of spiritual sustenance.

Oh dear... I practice Buddhism and I promised myself I wouldn't get into this. But I just did. Oh well...

Before I practiced Buddhism I called myself an Anarchist and here's a little bit of old Anarchist philosophy for you guys:

"Once and for all the idea of glorious victories won by the glorious army must be wiped out. Neither side is glorious. On either side they are just frightened men messing their pants. And they all want the same thing: not to lie under the Earth but to walk upon it, without crutches." - Peter Weiss (transl. Geoffrey Skelton)

[Tom McPhillips]

Civilisation is only two hot meals deep: When the population of a "civilised" country have to go without two hot meals in a row because there is no food, the guys with guns start robbing the guys without guns. That's got nothing to do with religion.

Well, actually that's not entirely true... Religion can form a major influence in defining a cultural identity and often is a big factor determining a group's ethnicity. It's a lot easier to justify one culture's supremacy over another if that other culture has different beliefs. The mess in Darfur is not caused by religion, true... but religion in particular and perceived ethnicity in general become the enabling excuse to grab another's land, food and water. The problem, as already elegantly stated by Con is not religion but "Mankind". However men invented religion, so religion does not lie outside the problem, indeed it's central to the problem. "Religion" isn't something you can isolate from human experience. In terms of religion, in Adam's example there are two outcomes. One is that religious beliefs inhibit the gunmen from stealing food, the second is that those same beliefs become justification to steal and kill for survival of one's group over another.

I hate Dawkins and all who sail in him (sorry Howard, but I do), especially that four letter fart Pullman who thinks he's so damned clever for making untold millions by ripping off chunks of Dante, Milton and weaving it together with J.K.Rowling in order to impress his oh-so-enlightened anti-Christian bullshit on a credulous populace starved to death of any kind of spiritual sustenance.

Ah, there I really part company! Dawkins has written some fine books, and I freely admit that he has influenced me hugely in the way I think about the world. "The Selfish Gene" should be required reading, whether or not you agree with it, it supplies a perspective on the world that is very revealing. The other book I regard as required reading is "Guns, germs and steel" by Jared Diamond. This is not to say that those guys are completely accurate in their take on the world, in the end both authors are simply stating a point of view but I cetainly feel that they help us to understand why we're all trapped in our own species because of how we evolved.

Philip Pullman is a fine author. I happen to enjoy his work enormously. That he has a world view that I'm sympathetic to is certainly a bonus. C.S. Lewis is another author of (older?) children's fantasy. I don't have much time for his world view, however that in no way prevents my enjoyment of "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" and all the other books in the series. One of my absolute favorite authors is Richard Hughes who wrote "A High Wind in Jamaica". I've just finished reading his biography. I was amazed to find that he had over the course of his life eventually become a very devout Christian. Perhaps because his major opus "The Human Predicament" was unfinished, I had always thought that his views were agnostic at the very least. Now I can see that Augustine, (the main protagonist) would probably have changed his beliefs by the end of the book in the same way as did his creator. Does that dampen my enthusiasm for Hughes? Of course not, I still think he's one of the greatest writers of his generation.

That you profess to be a Bhuddist surprises me, I thought one of the better tenets of that philosophy was to honour the otherness in people, I know Ying and Yang is more Chinese than Indian, but isn't that holistic view fundamental to your philosophy?

However, I really like (and mirror) your musical tastes!

[howard male]

Con wrote -

Religion is the mechanism and/or the excuse for many evil acts (it's far and away the biggest and most pervasive, I would argue), but it's not the cause of them. That honour belongs to mankind.

I believe it is the cause of them, or most of them. The mankind/religion question is a bit like the chicken/egg question. I suspect that religion arrived simultaneously with consciousness and human self-awareness: I think therefore I am... going to church on Sunday!

I also imagine it caused the first tribal wars: one tribe worshipped the sun, the other tribe worships the wind, the rest is history beginning.

Region makes people do weird shit because they are obliged to believe weird shit. What excuse can there be for female circumcision, misogyny leading to women being second-class citizens and even murdered still in most parts of the world, ethnic cleansing, homophobia? All directly connected to organised religions with no evidence that such twisted behaviour and prejudices would still be systematically encouraged and promoted if it weren't for religion.

Religion is the only area in contemporary life where argument doesn't have to be rational. That's why it's so dangerous. And not only that, but we are obliged to respect other cultures for cruel and brutal behaviour if it has its roots in religion - which it usually does.

We live in a crazy world, and it's because we are human beings under the spell of religions, not because we are human beings.

I was thinking today that perhaps evolution, for mankind at least, is now something that is intellectual rather than biological. After all, both the words 'biological' and 'intellectual' are human constructs anyway; vague, almost arbitrary distinctions - useful at times but also restrictive. But when we have an idea it is produced by our 'biological' brain, so who's to say evolution isn't now something which can be generated by new ideas replacing old ideas?

The biggest and best idea I can think of for helping us become a more civilised and tolerant race is to grow out of our attachment to these dangerously ambiguous and anachronistic books written thousands of years ago. I am optimistic that this is happening already but it will be a slow process (as evolution always is) and we can only hope that our species survives long enough to see these old books just become interesting works of ancient literature, and nothing more. It's the only hope we have.

[Ted]

Fair enough, I'm probably doing him an injustice, but I didn't really mean the Dawkins bandwagon so much as the atheist-zealot one that (understandably) has been on a bit of a roll over the last few years.

That'll be the one that flys airliners into buildings full of people, denies women control of their own bodies, invades other countries to grab their oil ? (I could go on but I'm sure you get the picture)

What atheist-zealot bandwagon? It's a complete fabrication Con. It's like left wing councils banning baa-baa black sheep, "The Race relations Industry" and all those other straw men thrown up by right-wing bigots of one flavour or another to feed the tabloids.

What exactly has happened here? A couple of intellectuals have written books. Err isn't that one of the things that civilised folk do to try to change things?
I'll admit there's a certain pleasure to be had from mercilessly ridiculing believers of nonsense, but the really important question is how you change their minds. Its pretty clear that Dawkins and Hitchens aren't about to change anybodys mind. Maybe they might prevent people from falling into the hands of believers in the supernatural but these books aren't written for kids. How do you stop people believing in this stuff? Most of it is actually so ridiculous that the only way to get people hooked is by bullying and bribing them as children. (Jehovahs Witness kids who aren't allowed to birthday parties get pizza and cake at church, numerous black churches terrify children with stories of a fierce vengeful god who will kill them if they stop believing - I'm sorry but people who do this to kids are scum in my book)

How many people from atheist homes who encounter religion after childhood start believing - almost none I would suggest.

To digress slightly, I think that the obsession with music that a lot of us here share is almost religious. (As a friend of mine said to an evangelist who asked him if he'd met Jesus Christ "No but I saw Miles Davis once"). Its practically a definition of a religion that it consists of a group of people who believe the same nonsense. Isn't that us?

Humans seem to have a need for magic - isn't that all that "spirituality" is?
Music seems like a harmless way of fulfilling this need.

I could go on but I know I'm not going to change anyone here's mind....

Cheers
TW

But while we're quoting anarchist slogans:
"Humanity will not be happy until the day when the last aristocrat has been hung with the guts of the last priest"

[Adam Blake]

That you profess to be a Bhuddist surprises me, I thought one of the better tenets of that philosophy was to honour the otherness in people, I know Ying and Yang is more Chinese than Indian, but isn't that holistic view fundamental to your philosophy

I didn't profess to be a Buddhist, I said that I practised Buddhism. Not the same thing. I try to honour the otherness in people until they piss me off with their unspeakable smart-arsery and I just want to punch them very hard. This is why I practise Buddhism, to try to overcome these base feelings. Just because Pullman is a good writer doesn't mean he isn't a smug sonofabitch plagiarist who needs a good kicking. And Dawkins... The kind of guy who'd look at a perfect sunset and start trying to describe it to you, in deeply condescending tones.

See what I mean? I shall now leave this thread that I should never have joined.

[Ted]

Just because Pullman is a good writer doesn't mean he isn't a smug sonofabitch plagiarist who needs a good kicking.

When your competition is J.K Rowling its easy to appear a "good" writer.

And Dawkins... The kind of guy who'd look at a perfect sunset and start trying to describe it to you, in deeply condescending tones.

Or maybe he'd talk about refraction, diffraction and all the scientific stuff that makes it beautiful, enabling you to dig it on a whole new level?

Cheers
TW

[howard male]

Adam wrote -

And Dawkins... The kind of guy who'd look at a perfect sunset and start trying to describe it to you, in deeply condescending tones.

Isn't it the same as when you describe and analyse the chord progression in a favourite Beatles song, Adam? I don't mean the condescending tones bit of course!

I too have my reservations about Dawkins - he can be a little chilling sometimes - but I do find the passion he generates in others at his apparent lack of passion, a little suspect. My feeling is that the guy is passionate about his love of science but over confident that it can, or ever will, provide all the answers. And he's not the most exciting of prose writers. But the passion is undoubtably there, as is the sense of wonder at the universe - he's not Mr Spock!

Garth wrote -

I have read neither the Dawkins or Hitchens book and have no intention of doing so: Hitchens i find especially offensive, a literary bootboy, Julie Burchill on steroids. A writer who does interest me is English philosopher John Gray and i thought his comments on fundamentalist athieists from last week's Guardian Review might be of interest to this debate:

Good to see you're as open minded about writers as you are about musicians, Garth. :-)

John Gray is an interesting thinker and writer - I got a lot from both 'Straw Dogs' and 'Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern' and found him a calm, lucid, and even humorous speaker when I went to a book launch a couple of years ago - a bit like Dawkins in fact.

And he certainly adds a whole different slant to this area of debate. But Hitchens and Dawkins are just different, equally valid, slants on the same subject. There is no right answer here, just perspectives, each of which makes an important contribution to the debate. It's like you're saying that if you were sitting in a room with these three men, you would listen intently while Gray made his points, but then stick your fingers in your ears while going "blaaaahhh" whenever the other two spoke.

[Adam Blake]

[Isn't it the same as when you describe and analyse the chord progression in a favourite Beatles song, Adam? I don't mean the condescending tones bit of course!


It's like you're saying that if you were sitting in a room with these three men, you would listen intently while Gray made his points, but then stick your fingers in your ears while going "blaaaahhh" whenever the other two spoke.

Oh, Howard, you drag me back! Kicking and screaming! Much as I love The Beatles (and their chord progrssions) I wouldn't compare their works - or any man-made confection - to a perfect sunset. And sticking your fingers in your ears and going "blaaaah" strikes me as a singularly appropriate response to the likes of Dawkins and his hideous ilk!

And Ted, I can't quite make out whether you are being ironic but, yes, that is exactly what I'm talking about. Reminds me of the long Latin names for plants. They're lovely words but the plants don't know that that's what their names are, and they certainly don't answer to them!

Y'all have a nice day now... :)