Thursday, 13. Dec, 2007 - 02:49:23
I've been putting off reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins because I knew what was in it, however I was recently loaned a copy by a friend and I am now dragging my feet through its 400+ pages.
As I thought, it is telling me nothing that I haven't known for many years. In fact I can barely remember a time when I didn't have reservations about the whole God thing. Even when I was 7 or 8 years old; when at school they gave us religous assemblies complete with hymns and prayers; with my mother being a Catholic believer, I can remember asking "who made God".
The "who made God" conundrum is one of the basic tenets of The God Delusion (and let's face it; it's a pretty good first line in an argument for an atheist, and a hefty 6 inch nail in the coffin for a bible basher) but it isn't exactly clever. The clever bit is that a bloke made a lot of money by stating the bleeding obvious.
Other obvious arguments Dawkins makes are:
1. There is no evidence that God is in any way 'good'. In fact, if starving children and suicide bombers weren't evidence enough, then just read some of the bits of the Bible (Old Testemant in particular) where he's a right savage bastard.
2. Darwinian evolution makes so much sense. Not to be confused with Darwinian insurance rip-offs which doesn't seem to make much sense at all.
3. Praying gets you nowhere. Except if you're a bit crafty: ie don't pray to God for a bike, instead pinch a bike first and then pray for forgiveness.
It's not that I disapprove of Richard Dawkins, far from it. His book, The Blind Watchmaker is a superb description of how evolution happens and is well worth reading even if you think you understand the mechanism. It's just that, well I'm not sure if spreading the message of atheism is all that great an idea.
Sure, if a few suicide bombers, or the lunatic creationists in the USA, or the mad Jews who think it's a good idea to set up a country on someone else's land so that we can all have a jolly good hate and perpetual wars against our neighbours, or the Shi'ites and Sunnis or the Catholics and Protestants....etc... IF they were to read this book, then it may suddenly dawn on them what twits they really are and they might stop causing so much suffering. But it aint going to happen. The thick gits are more likely to buy a 100 copies and burn them in the streets than actually read one.
So that leaves us athiest to read what to us has been pretty bloody obvious for many years. And that's my problem.
You see, being an athiest isn't easy. In fact it must be the worst thing in the world. Only us athiest know we're going to die. We have to live each day with the knowledge that our lives are just a flash of light in between two vast darknesses and hence, pointless. If you're an athiest you'll know what I mean. If you're agnostic, you'll have your doubts too. If you're religous then you'll be wanting to spout something like "let God into your life", to which I would say, "no thanks, I've heard enough about your religion to know that there's more sense in the Beano than in your holy book".
What I need from a book about atheism is something along the lines of "This whole God thing is a load of bollocks and we're all going to die, but its okay because......"
Of course I have no idea what comes next because from where I'm standing it all seems so very very depressing. On the plus side, I still have 200 pages left to read, maybe it will turn out to have a happy ending after all
Keep yer chin up!
) just is' thing, and it's just the case that our tiny minds can't comprehend such things? Secondly, I'll switch to corresponding numbers for ease:
2008-05-28 @ 11:51