false 4 15 false false Fri May 30 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue May 06 09:15:10 -0700 2008 Fri May 30 12:29:37 -0700 2008 The God Delusion took a while, but not because it’s long or somehow difficult. It is a jaunty text, in fact, and I found myself often stopping to ponder and/or revel in Richard Dawkins’ happy heathen insights. Also, I do much of my reading on the bus, and you never know when some surly Christian’s going to appear in the seat next to you.

Dawkins’ arguments for not believing in God or the “perfection” of the Bible (or the Koran or whatever basic religious text you please) are strong, cogent, and thorough. But as my goodreads friend, laura (small L; I don’t know why) has already entertainingly said in a different way, he does not offer pithy sound bites for use in sudden throwdowns with hostile, bus-riding believers. It’s not Dawkins’ intention to arm us with atheist verbal weaponry. His expressed hope, rather, is that the lonely non-believer might find in his book a few measures of comfort, consolation, and community. Still, I admit that I have a certain smug Baptist nephew whose prefrontal cortex I now, after reading The God Delusion, imagine splaying with Dawkins’ logical observation that God cannot be both omniscient and omnipresent.

God walks into a bar. He calls out, “Barkeep!” (yes, Yahweh, old school God, says “barkeep”) “Draw me a Guinness!” The bartender places the frothy black liquid before the deity. God eyeballs it and booms (God can’t help but boom when he speaks): “I have changed my mind! I want a Sapphire martini!” The bartender gives God a look and says, “You can’t do that.” God grows indignant: “Whaaa-?! I can do whatever I want!” The bartender shakes his head. “You can’t change your mind,” he says. “But I am omnipotent!” “Look pal,” says the bartender, “didn’t you tell me last time you were in here you’re God the Omniscient?” “Yes, of course!” “Well, then, you can’t change your mind because when a mind changes it moves from a held thought to a previously unheld thought. But you say you know everything, including all thoughts all the time, thus for you there are no unheld thoughts, which means that changing your mind is something you cannot do, thus you cannot do everything, therefore you’re not omnipotent.” God seethes. “Look, you can be omnipotent or you can be omniscient. Not both. Your choice,” the bartender adds, smirking. So God calls forth a lightning bolt and smites the bartender, who bursts into flame. The bar burns to the ground. As God walks away, he mutters (boomingly), “I knew that was going to happen!”

If you don’t think that’s funny, blame my paraphrase, not Dawkins. He does like to joke around, though. And laura gets some jocular mileage herself out of calling Dawkins a “smarty-pants” British professor with a “holier-than-thou attitude,” although I suspect that her discomfort may largely arise from the fact that Dawkins’ own jokes tend to fall flat (he did do pretty well on Bill Maher’s show, though, so maybe it’s writing jokes that stumps him). He plays it smart. He quotes lots of funny people, like Woody Allen and Douglas Adams (who once was his bff, quite apparently). And he’s not really as all-fired mean or ungenerous as laura implies, but he is blunt, and he’s fed up with religious tyranny of all kinds and the wide slack we Westerners habitually cut religion lest it get its sensitive, little, millennia-old feelings hurt. He’s also damned sick, as we all well should be, of the mental and emotional religious abuses to which children are put every day – and we’re not just talking about the inexcusable pedophilia of certain religious “leaders,” either.

Rather than generate pro-atheist talking points, The God Delusion illuminates the rationale for atheism, answers old criticisms, and anticipates new ones. One thing Dawkins makes especially clear is that religion and atheism are not two sides of the same coin. They are not coequal ends of some human belief spectrum. Faith is the (stubborn) adherence to an idea despite a lack of evidence for it. In fact, it seems that the more evidence against an idea (like virgin birth) mounts, the more obstinate grows the believer’s insistence upon it. In the parlance of faith, this is known as “strength.” Atheism (or rationality – Dawkins uses “atheism” and “reason” pretty much interchangeably), does rely on evidence. What atheism knows about the universe is not hard and fast, it’s open, and it changes and adapts and grows as new discoveries are made and new evidence is revealed. Inert, unchanging, incurious faith does not balance the rational appetite for knowledge.

My nephew would so rail and flail at me! He would hurl all sizes and shapes of disputation cherry-picked from King James’ centuries-old, “infallible” text (that can get barely even one of its own stories straight) directly at my head. Yet I doubt that the little Levitican has ever considered how decimated our family would be if we were to stone to death all its adulterers and pre-marital partiers, then sell our sisters (one being his mother) into slavery, or that he’s ever allowed himself to be puzzled by “infinite regress” (or, put vertically, the notion that it’s “turtles all the way down”) and why any god presumed to be at the “end” of that infinity must therefore be one that begat Jesus. Could he entertain the thought that all believers are atheists when it comes to religions other than their own? I don’t think so. I should just leave his brain be, I think. And give my own a break.

A sadness thus overhangs this book and all its kin, such as God Is Not Great, by the politically confused Christopher Hitchens, another stuffy Brit, and Sam Harris’ Letter to A Christian Nation, which, thanks to Dawkins and laura, I’m reading now. The lamentable truth is that The God Delusion is unlikely to reach those who could most benefit from it –even if they were to actually read it. Faith that allows reason is weak in the knees.

Dawkins’ wants The God Delusion to incite consciousness-raising – actually rationality-raising, if you ask me, given Dawkins hypothesis that an increase in reason will yield a decrease in delusions of holy imaginary friends. He repeatedly turns to the women’s movement for examples of consciousness-raising as a strategic zeitgeist-changer. But the successes of the women’s movement have taken time, and are still taking yet more time. Collective consciousness rises ploddingly. How much time do we have before the jihadists or a General Boynton, lusting for Armageddon, blow us all to smithereens? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure that Richard Dawkins is running out of patience.

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