If Dawkins had hoped to win a guy like me over with the preface, he most definitely failed. He starts off with an anecdote from his wife who went to her parents in adulthood to tell them how much she hated her (assumably religious) elementary school. Her parents asked her “Why didn’t you tell us?” to which she responded “I didn’t know that I could?”

He then launches into a page-long assertion that he thinks the reason most people don’t leave their faith is because they “didn’t know they could”. He hopes his book will show them that they can. I couldn’t help but physically ‘snort laugh’ when I read it.

Yeah, THAT’S the reason. Our society provides no visible avenue for people to walk away from their faith. I mean, it’s ridiculous just on the surface, much less as one delves into the idea.

I will give him this. It does appear when one is an atheist that everyone around you is religious and when you talk to them you never seem to get a sufficient answer for why that is the case. So I can see how it might appear that everyone feels trapped.

However, speaking from experience, it’s just a variant of the “everyone around me is an idiot” excuse. Seriously, how could one look at the openness of our society and conclude that people don’t know they can get out other than by thinking people are collectively dolts. In fact, even the story of his wife that he’s using is a story of his wife as a child and her preadolescent ideas of what she could or could not do. He’s then taking that preadolescent mindset and applying it to all the adults around him. He’s treating us all like little kids who are two immature to know that we don’t have to believe.

Dawkins then continues on with a series of paragraphs addressing how the book is organized. Basically, he listed a whole bunch of reasons people are reluctant to leave and then points them to the chapters he think will most help them do so. To give him full credit, the list of reasons is a reasonable one and his methodology for attacking them is reasonable on its surface. Of course the content of the attacks will have to wait until I get to each of those chapters. Nevertheless, he does seem to be taking a reasonable approach to methodically addressing the assertions of religion.

My preconception about the book mostly being about why religion has caused more harm than good, assuming his preface can be trusted as to what he accomplishes, seems to be only partially true. While he did spend a couple paragraphs rattling off a list of all the evils of religion (and being a list it lacked any of the necessary critical assessments I complain about, but one shouldn’t be too harsh when it’s a list) but it appears most of the book will be more methodical than that.

His bigger bias, based on the preface, seems to be that the mere raising of kids in a religion does harm to children and thus to society. It seems this is the wedge he’ll be using, basically calling it a form of abuse. We’ll see how this plays out as the book continues and whether this theme becomes a tired yet broken record.

Its a funny assertion because I’m sure he wouldn’t object one bit to children being taught that there is no God. No, those would be “brave” parents who escaped the terrifying grip religion has on society and are making sure to pass it on their children before they’re caught in it’s terrifying grasp. His argument that kids should be allowed to decide for themselves apparently doesn’t apply to his viewpoint.

Along these lines he brings up the fact that most people are the religion that their parents are. He uses this to suggest that religion is false just because he can take one kid and move them somewhere else and they’ll believe something else. He argues that shows the beliefs are arbitrary.

That doesn’t address two things however:

1. I’m most definitely not the religion of my parents and there are tons of people who aren’t. I went from lack of faith to faith. Others go from one faith to another. Still others go from faith to no faith, like his wife. So it’s clearly not a logical truth, it’s a loosely true demographic truth. He’s treating it like a logical one. The reality is that every adult has to decide for themselves what of their upbringing to maintain and what to reject. In the end we’ll own our own faith, or lack thereof, no matter what our parents did.

2. The corollary of that point is that demographics change. The Roman society was pagan and over the course of a couple hundred years became Christian. How does that happen if his assertion is correct? The reality is that while we are biased towards the religion of our parents, we can and do change and over the course of multiple generations, huge shifts DO occur and those changes reflect how compelling the religious arguments made during those centuries are. So the fact that we in the west are mostly Christian does not mean we’re dolts who are just doing what our parents did (notice the stupidity theme) it’s that over the centuries our collective intelligence showed Christianity to be the most appealing religious belief. (I would say “true” in the place of appealing, but to be generic, that’s as much as can be asserted based solely on demographics.)

In any case, the preface wraps up, after the tirade/list about the evils religion has done, the list of objections to his views and which chapters he addresses that, followed by a return to why “indoctrinating” children is a bad thing, by coming full circle back to his ridiculous “they didn’t know they could” assertion and driving it home as if its a compelling thought.

He’s going to let us know, “YES WE CAN!”

And with that we’ll move on to Chapter 1…

(Note: As mentioned in my It’s Alive!?! post I’ll be reading and reviewing The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (TGD). Click on the Catholicism – The God Delusion category to see all of these posts, including this one.)

Here’s a quick overview of what I’m expecting based on what I’ve heard from others, before I’ve ever picked up the book:

I’m expecting a lot on all the evils done by religion and I’m expecting it to be highly Christianity focused, although I’m sure the recent evils of Islamic Jihadism will get some play as well. I thought of reading the book after a discussion online, ironically on a sports blog, where TGD was repeatedly referenced by numerous people for how convincing it was that religion wasn’t just benign but actually makes the world a worse place.

So I’m expecting lots of examples of the bad things done in the name of religion. I’m quite confident there will be no statistical analysis of how this compares to the evils done when no religion was involved (what a scientist would call a “control group”). I’m also quite confident there will be no attempt made to determine whether the evil was truly done as a result of religious conviction or whether it just happened to be done by people who are religious (what a scientist would call “causation”). I also expect that there will be no attempt to discover in cases where it was done “in the name of religion” if what was done was actually in line with the dogmas and doctrines of their religion or whether the individuals were mistaken as to what their religion teaches (another aspect of “causation”). Finally, for those cases where in fact the religion can actually be blamed, I suspect there will be no attempt to differentiate between religions, as if one religions theological errors are the fault of all religions (another example of lacking an appropriate “control group”), and further there will be no attempt to understand the rationale behind the move, that it will be analyzed through secular eyes as if that’s the only way to view the world.

In short, I’m expecting it, despite the authors claims, to be very short on logic and scientific analysis. Lots of assumptions will be made. Possibility sets will be artificially small (often because the author lacks the imagination to see additional possibilities). Generally speaking, there will be claims of scientific rigor, when in fact it will be completely lacking.

For the critical reader, they might be thinking that I’m starting the book making a lot of assumptions, which is quite true. This bias comes both from what I’ve heard about the book from all sides and how it leads me to believe that Dawkins fits a stereotype I have of the “arrogant scientific atheist”. I’ve talked with many people who more or less fit the stereotype, so it comes from personal experience, not 3rd party accusations. But more than that, it comes from from within me as I once could be properly labeled similarly. I personally know what it is to feel that God doesn’t exist and thinking that all religions and religious were barking made. I’ve been there. His arguments in principle won’t be foreign to me as I’ve likely made most of them, or at least a similarly minded one, in the past.

But thanks be to God he revealed Himself to me and I’ve been a fervent Catholic ever since.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t mitigate that I go into this book with a bias and I won’t deny it. For those who would snicker at the thought, I’ll only justify it with this: I’m reading the book. Generally the charge leveled at those with a bias is that they refuse to consider other points of view. That would be justified if I stuck to my bias and refused to read it (note that there are other reasons besides bias not to read it such as time limitations, etc, so I don’t hold anything against those who don’t). But that is not the case. I am reading it. Frankly I hope that I’m surprised, that he gives religion its full due while defending atheists. There are those atheists out there who both think there is no God but also are fair enough in their mind to recognize the intellectually sound arguments for the other side and I’ve yet to find a book that communicates that.

That book would one everyone should read because it would help everyone understand exactly what is at stake, not what each side claims is at stake, which is generally artificially skewed favorably in their direction, at least as far as the public perception goes. It would help people understand what is indeed fact and what must be filled in with belief, whether that be belief in a single God, multiple competing spirits, perhaps an after life or reincarnation, or whether one would believe that none of that exists.

And so I’ll open the book and give Dawkins his opportunity to prove me wrong, that my bias was unjustified.

For anyone who’s tried to come to this blog (hi Mom!) in the last year or so they’ve seen that it hasn’t come up and has been displaying some cryptic error. I tried a number of times to fix it because I wanted to bring the blog back and be more active about posting on it. Last night I took the brute force strategy. I completely deleted the old one and installed the latest version. Then I attached the new version to the old database and…

IT’S ALIVE!?!

So, what to expect from this blog moving forward… The main reason for bringing the blog back online is that I’m going to read Richard Dawkins “The God Delusion” so that I can rebut it. I’ve heard from too many anti-religious circles how devastating it is to the idea that religion is a good thing and I’m curious to find out what his argument is. I’ll speak to what I expect it to be in a separate post.

I’ll also go back to posting on the political and religious news of the day when it’s worth reporting on. It won’t be as comprehensive as in the past, more just when I feel the need to rant. Finally, there will be more family stuff posted. Things we did, blessings received, pictures, etc.

Hopefully, you’ll be interested in visiting.