major_clanger | Books: The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins (Reply)

Possibly the most thought-provoking book I've read this year.

I am an atheist. I don't believe in God, or gods, or supernatural forces. I have been since early in my time as an undergraduate, partly through exposure to the reasoned scepticism of some of my fellow students, and partly through reading books such as Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. But that book, like many of its ilk, was really aimed at explaining why the Argument from Design was unnecessary and invalid for explaining the amazing complexity wrought by evolution. The God Delusion goes much further than that; Dawkins sets out to show why, in his view, belief in a Creator is not just unnecessary and superfluous but is actively wrong-headed, destructive and above all corrosive to the human spirit. Dawkins doesn't want us to admit to being atheists; he wants us to be proud of it. For, he argues, if we are not, we sell ourselves very short in the argument with those who are religious and proud of it. And why is such an argument important? Because whilst our pride as atheists should lead us to do no more than insist that we choose how we think, very often the pride of the religious drives them to insist that they choose how we think.

It would be difficult to do justice to Dawkins' arguments in anything less than an article-length essay, so I will merely commend this book in the strongest terms to you, irrespective of your religious beliefs or lack of them. I very much doubt that many people who read this will agree with all of it; in fact, I am sure that a fair few of my friends will find much to argue with. But Dawkins very clearly lays out a wide gamut of the arguments about religion; reading this book, irrespective of your beliefs, should at the very least make it a lot easier to have an informed discussion of them.

And for me? Well, having read the book, I went back to my Facebook profile and amended the hitherto carefully-left-blank 'Religious Views' slot to 'Atheist'. And whilst I haven't actually bought the T-shirt, I do now have an appropriate icon.