Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
I wanna hear about The God Delusion when you finish.  |
Finished it, and now wondering how to write about it...
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and an atheist. The God Delusion is partly an attempt at examining religion from an evolutionary point of view, and partly a heartfelt, impassioned rant.
It's dedicated to the memory of Douglas Adams (Adams credited one of Dawkins books with converting him (Adams) to atheism), and early on he expresses the hope that this book would have made Douglas Adams laugh. It is a serious book, but not entirely written in a serious tone. The humour tends to be a very British (not really surprising
) observational humour; dry and sarcastic.
The book's stance is unapologetically and unsurprisingly anti-religious. Dawkins takes issue with blind acceptance even when the information available is contradictory, or there is evidence against what is being believed. But whilst this makes up a large portion of the book, it is not what the book is about - it is there as explanatory and background material as much as anything. Dawkins is seeking to find possible evolutionary reasons behind religious belief and to understand why this sort of behaviour might have come about and still seemingly be hard-wired into humans. There is a fascinating section on
cargo cults which gives an overview of just how quickly these things take hold and become accepted.
I found it to be an engaging, thought-provoking and sometimes challenging book, and I would recommend it to most people. (Dawkins lists a
theist-atheist scale fairly early on in the book - I probably wouldn't recommend it to people who lay in either 1 or 7...)