“The God Delusion “, a book review

For years now I have wanted to read Richard Dawkins’ book. “The God Delusion”. But, I kept putting it off………the fact is that I was a bit reluctant……..what if he presented an unassailable argument against my faith? Well, I finally bit the bullet……and I have just finished reading it. I was expecting a scholarly and fair academic analysis of the presence or absence of God. After all, Dawkins is a professor at Oxford. What I found was quite different. The first sentence in the second chapter is Dawkin’s description of God.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Wow……. certainly gets your attention. This line pretty much sets the tone for what follows.

These are not the words of an honest academic inquiry. They are not the description that you would expect of someone whom Dawkins says doesn’t even exist. Rather, they are words that come from somewhere between anger, hatred and malice. The book is more of a “hit piece” than a dispassionate quest for truth.

I have often said that you don’t have to say something that is factually untrue………to tell a lie. The book is loaded with quotes and citations……..all of them, I have no doubt, accurate. But Dawkins presents only the facts that support his position. Anything positive about God is dismissed as myth…….or completely ignored. Anything that he interprets as negative about God is treated as fact. He dwells on the old testament and essentially ignores the teachings of Christ. He completely ignores the central theme of the Bible……..”love God/love your fellow man”. Publishing this book would be a bit like publishing a biography of Mother Teresa…….a book that contains a list of her parking tickets and overdue library books, a description of a tantrum that she threw as a child, and a falsehood that she once told……..and nothing else (all of it completely factual and true…….and yet, as a biography………a complete lie).

He treats Darwian evolution as an all encompassing explanation. He calls it a “crane”……..I’m not quite sure what that means. And yet he offers little justification for it and little or no defense of its failures. He dedicates chapters to developing fairly contorted “workarounds” to human characteristics that are clearly non-Darwinian.

He includes one chapter that compares the act of raising your children as Christians to child abuse. This chapter dwells on the molestation of children by Catholic priests. His concludes this chapter by quoting himself…….. that raising your child as a Christian is worse than sexually abusing a child.

“the damage (from sexual abuse) was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic”.

If this book had been a balanced, honest, scholarly investigation, it might have been damaging to my faith. Instead, what I discovered was a biased, dishonest, hostile (Dawkins’ word) hatchet job.

In short, I was terribly relieved by the book. It is clearly an attack on God in general and Christianity in particular. It is not, however, fatal. If you are a Christian, I think you will be saddened by this book. You may be offended…… you might even be angry. If you are agnostic or undecided, you will find it highly biased. If you are an atheist……or if you actively despise Christians………you are going to love it.