Saturday, March 21, 2009
Read “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins a while back. I remember reading that Dawkins suggested this idea for a book to promote atheism to his agent around the year 2000. It got rejected initially since publishers didn't believe that there will be a market. When W. became president of USA, the pendulum had started swinging quite a bit towards the religious right that around 2004 it appeared like an opportune moment to write this book. Subsequently when it came out in 2006, it became a best seller and has garnered a lot of attention in the pop culture, being used even in the popular cartoon TV show Family Guy..! Basic argument in the book is that belief in any kind of supernatural God promoted by religions is nonsense and it always leads the world towards conflict and hatred towards each other. Dawkins strongly opposes even lighter versions of religion saying while it may appear harmless and altruistic, it only softens people up aiding and abetting a few to move further into religious extremism, suicide bombings and so on. Having grown up in Southern India where a famous atheist in the last century encouraged his followers to attack priests and demolish temples, I was wondering if Dawkins' argument will apply in the other direction as well, i.e. while preaching atheism may be harmless, it might prep a few extremists who may move further and turn violent. Obviously he is not encouraging violent demolitions of churches and synagogues but only a cerebral move towards a more rational, non-religious, logical, scientific world.
Overall the book feels more like a collection of articles on this topic rather than one tightly written book. This may be excused since he had to touch upon various areas and topics to be comprehensive. Him being an evolutionary biologist, there is a lot of content related to evolution that are borrowed from his various other books. This perhaps indicates how difficult it is to be consistently creative and come up with original ideas.)
He talks about Einstein's use of the word God, and ideas like God could be a set of equations, etc. right at the beginning to say that is not the God he is talking about. His discussion is about the supernatural omniscient God who created the world as religions (particularly Christianity, Islam and Judaism) promote. He spends enough pages to answer arguments like there is an innate need for God in human beings, religion is what gives us our moral compass, etc. In case you haven't heard of Hauser's Denise's Dilemma, you can read this link. Hauser's idea is that we have a moral compass that is innate which has nothing to do with religion since people of all religion and atheists respond to these thought experiments the same way. Dawkins then dove tails to propose that the cynical religious argument "there are no atheists in fox holes" could possibly be countered with, "there probably are no atheists in prison". :-) In addition he also asks if people will lead a moral life only if there is a God watching over them, doesn't that mean that they are only sucking up to God due to fear and are not righteous by themselves.
I was thinking along the lines of the amount of time/energy/resources that have gone into religion and wouldn't we lose it all if we simply get rid of every form of religion..? He acknowledges this point on his own towards the end saying we should treat, preserve and cherish it just as part of human history (like Egyptian pyramids for example). Though this book may not convert anyone anytime soon, it is a good read.
I wrote about his documentary "Root of All Evil?" a while back. Got some good responses. While the Channel 4 link is still there at http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/rootofevil.html the Google video site that offered the video for download no longer exists. That documentary pretty much covered the content of this book as well. BTW, his website http://richarddawkins.net/ looks so cluttered and silly. I think he needs to hire a new webmaster. :-)
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