Richard Dawkins

I notice there's a new book from that evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins: "The God Delusion". The title says it all! There's an interesting review in The Sunday Times by Rod Liddle which makes many of the points I might have raised myself. In case you are interested, you can find it here.

Comments

[Harry]

Interesting review by Rod Liddle, but it trots out the usual red herring about the godless totalitarian regimes of the last century. The history of the late 20th century is littered with massacres of the innocent carried out by men of supposedly religious faith whose breadth of achievement falls short of the crimes of their predecessors not through lack of ambition but through more restricted opportunity and the (sadly limited) intervention of other countries.

It's also worth noting, too, that in the case of Nazi Germany, history has revealed the connivance, both implicit and actual, of a large proportion of the religious, god-fearing populace in the persecution of the Jews.

That a perverson of scientific belief should be used as an excuse for inhuman behaviour is no different from the use being made of perversions of religious faith in the world today. Both are perversions to be deplored.

Howeve, whilst sharing Richard Dawkins's distaste for organised religion, I find I'm still inclined to the view expressed by Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo: "That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such - be it so; but still there is something mysterious in life. Now call that God, or whatever you like, but there is something which I cannot define systematically, though it is very much alive and very real, that is God, or as good as God."

As Eric Maisel, in his excellent book, The Van Gogh Blues, points out, "That something exists which is 'as good as God' is not at all the same state of affairs as something existing that is God."

[Paul Vincent]

Like you, Simon, I've not much to add to the points made in the review; still less after Harry's insightful comments. I'll just note *my* belief that what Dawkins shares with the less-appealing brands of religious fundamentalism, is a conviction that it's not sufficient that he believes there to be no God, he must seek to convince others that his viewpoint is the only right one. From here it's only a short step to the view that dissenting voices are, by definition, evil. And from that premise pours forth most of the large-scale atrocities of recent history, whether it's the Holocaust, the Cambodian Year Zero, the Crusades (OK, a bit less recent, that one), or the institutional repression of dissent in China. Personally, I'm an agnostic shading slightly towards atheism, but I pursue many of the principles of Buddhism, at least partly because it's a God-shaped-hole-filler that is resolutely non-evangelical. If anyone wants to argue that Buddhism is nonsense, I smile and change the subject, as I view that as being a correct response, in the spirit of Buddhism.