Ya, I finally finished reading The God Delusion and, ya, it took me a while to get through it. So what? I'd say I'm a pretty fucking fluent when it comes to reading, but this book forced me (my brain, mostly) to truly comprehend what Dawkins was writing, sentence by sentence. Nonetheless, I recommend all to give it a read if you haven't already.
I know O'Reilly is an easy target for any debate, but I found the following bit nonetheless amusing:
Terry Eagleton wrote a pretty solid (but dubious in places) review of The God Delusion a few years ago:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
"The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough."
I haven't read this book, as I usually find books arguing against Christianity to be beating a dead horse. Religious people are largely impervious to reason, and so these books seem to exist primarily for the rest of us to feel good about ourselves when we read them (which is probably why they sell well). The last one I read was Bertrand Russell's collection Why I Am Not a Christian about 5 years ago. It was pathetically lacking insight, which is not surprising now that I have read more of Russell's oeuvre. Particularly comical are the modern assertions that it was dangerous and groundbreaking for a philosopher to question the dogma of Christianity in the 1920's and 30's.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I do find Richard Dawkins' books on evolution interesting, and have confidence that he could write a book on this subject that would be distinguished from the pack.
Finally: "my brain, mostly" was a good funny!