The God Delusion

I finished the subject book by Richard Dawkins and blogged on it in my old blog in January of 2007. The book talks about how the US is very close to a "theocracy," and the "Christian Right" is "the American Taliban". In the West, atheism seems to be losing ground simply because people who only care about short-term pleasure and believe the world is meaningless tend to not reproduce. They are strong believers in natural selection, certain of their superiority to infantile believers, that they make the logical decision to not reproduce, while the stupid believers are having larger and larger families.

Dawkins sees belief in God to be a clear and present danger. Page 317: "Horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was in the Catholic Chruch, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place". Page 318: "I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell."

Dawkins finds Christianity (and all religion) to be a form of child abuse, and while he hasn’t directly called for children to be taken from their parents if the parents are going to "indoctrinate" them, he does everything but.

Page 339: "Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents".

Like most “liberals,” he doesn't say what to DO about this "horror," but it doesn't take much imagination. In the liberal world, freedom is freedom to agree with the current leftist narrative.

Dawkins saw 9-11 as an opportunity to "do in religion". One simply needs to declare all religions the same (irrational, delusional, unsupportable, etc.) and dangerous. The fault is religion, all religion, and what we need to do is replace faith in God with faith in “the science,” and then people will be "rational". Science has given us nuclear weapons, Covid, and many other things that at least appear somewhat dangerous, so maybe we can call that even?

I argue that Dawkins and everyone else have an awful lot of "irrational faith". We have faith that we will draw our next breath, a belief that will be falsified in the blink of an eye relative to eternity. We tend to think that the model of the universe running around in our head is "accurate," even though we know it is delayed by an eternity in computer time (what we "see" took at least 13 milliseconds to register in our brain, and even then, incomplete in the extreme). To the extent that we are "scientists," we have faith that this universe is ordered enough so that measurements and experiments done yesterday or tomorrow can be compared with each other by known principles that will hold across space and time. (Quantum Wave Theory makes those assumptions less certain.)

For the believer in random creation, it is a HUGE leap of faith, since all that order "just happened" ... without meaning or purpose. A pure random event that can’t be tested, so is therefore not scientific.

While on that subject, apparently Dawkins can't conceive of anything being "beyond material" or "eternal". God can't be postulated, because he would have to have been formed by something even more complex than the universe we see. Really? It seems very hard to see any basis for that "rule". Why again should there be "something" rather than "nothing"? Since we seem to agree that there is "something," is postulating that there is "something beyond" that big of a leap? Both cosmology with the "inflation theory" and evolution with "punctuated equilibrium" have their "creation spurts;" the difference is that they want to be clear that from their POV, it "just happens".

1st Corinthians 13:13: "But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.". Page 185, Dawkins: "Could irrational religion be a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in love?". This section of the book makes it clear that Dawkins doesn't find love to to be a good thing either ... a bad piece of evolution that apparently makes us susceptible to religion. How about hope? Well, of course not, that would be "infantile". Page 354: "...Jefferson more than once wrote to friends that he faced the approaching end without either hope or fear. This was as much as to say, in the most unmistakable terms, that he was not a Christian.". Yes, Dawkins believes that a better world is a world without faith, hope, or love.

The culture we live in believes all the "pleasure" we can get is the highest good. The only part of the Catholic Church he has sympathy for is the pedophiles. Naturally, homosexuality, abortion on demand, and euthanasia are all to be encouraged. He quotes Dr. Puppy Love, Peter Singer, a couple of times, but doesn't explicitly mention some of Pete’s superior moral stances (eating meat is immoral, sex with animals is moral, infanticide is moral, killing "unfit elderly" is moral).

Dawkins views Hitler as more moral than other bad guys in history. "Hitler seems especially evil only by the more benign standards of our time". Why, even the horror of Donald Rumsfeld is only in comparison to the "enlightened" standards of today; "Donald Rumsfeld, who sounds so callous and odious today, would have sounded like a bleeding-heart liberal if he had said the same things during the Second World War." (p268)

All is relative to whatever the dominant culture thinks at a given time. Might is right!

Some will ask, "Why do I put myself through this"? Dawkins sits in a tenured chair at Cambridge. The book was high on the bestseller lists and got rave reviews in the popular culture. The same culture that bleats every day or so about the "American theocracy". If you desire to understand theocracy better, fly a Pride flag in Iran or Afghanistan.

Dawkins won't say it directly, but it is clear that he is in favor of the removal of religious freedom, and the creation of a country without faith, love, or hope as rapidly as he possibly can. Christians need to be aware that the forces that seek to use them as lion food are still afoot. He would like to kill all the Muslims too, but at least in that case, the feeling is mutual!

However, his imagined, undiscovered country will still have faith -- faith that a "reasonable government" that persecutes Christians (because you have to in order to stamp them out) is "good"... like the USSR, Communist China, and Nazi Germany. The state will force you and your children to worship the state (for the “greater good,” of course!)

Many find this vision compelling because they have faith that a godless totalitarian nation will be a utopia of pleasure. Progressives tend to believe that history is bunk, so “past results are not a guarantee of future results”. Indeed. However, in finances we do tend to look at the past. If one cared to look at history, the evidence of totalitarian utopia is quite sparse.