Digital Sextant

The God Delusion

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins; narrated by Lalla Ward and the author

So in my quest to read a variety of books about spirituality, God, and more, I just finished listening to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.  Dawkins wields some strong rhetorical arguments about religious belief.  A few thoughts:

• He’s at his most successful when he’s arguing about the social cost of religion as an institution and the challenges religious belief brings to the strict rationalist.
• I think his assertion that we should teach children how to think about religious belief, rather than what particular belief to hold, is interesting and useful.
• In a conversation with a friend, I pondered whether Dawkins and Hitchens have arisen as a particularly strident voice for athiesm because the fundamentalist muslim influence in the U.K. right now is pushing the entire culture away from the polite secularism it has enjoyed these last few decades.
• The audio performance was interesting, with Dawkins and Lalla Ward alternating passages.  I couldn’t really detect a specific reason for some of the switches from voice to voice.  It was a little distracting, but not too much.

A thoughtful book, and worth reading to get the “new athiest” perspective.