I am finally done with the Dawkins’ The God Delusion which I bought last year. Yes, I finished it just over a year after I picked it off the shelf at some bookstore.
It is filled with too much polemics and I was caught off guard on how fierce Dawkins argues against religion in The God Delusion despite being familiar with his well-publicized opinion. I should have braced myself when I read this paragraph:
A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts — the non-religious included — is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other. [The God Delusion. Richard Dawkins. Page 20]
The first chapters are dedicated to discrediting religion. Ignoring the polemics — sometimes, it is hard; I couldn’t help but smile at one point or another; simply too amusing and entertaining — reading for me was easy and I breezed through it. The one point which I stopped and pondered for awhile amid the polemics concerned the Pascal’s wager. I really think I should thank Dawkins for solving the puzzle for me.
The rhythm goes a pace higher at midpoint where he explains, to a certain extent, how evolution affected religion and — more interestingly — moral. I have read earlier on how moral might be dictated by genetics but I am convinced of it only until I read Dawkins’.
From the same idea, he insists that moral and religion are independent of each other. I have reached the same conclusion before and I could only nod in agreement with him. Dawkins goes further by stating that moral precedes religions. To strengthen that, he shows how there are commonalities of morality across most religions despite the fact that many of these religions developed separately. To answer the puzzle of commonalities, he returns to genetics and evolution, his forte.
For those unfamiliar with Dawkins, he is a biologist at Oxford. Wikipedia, as usual, has a great article on him.
What surprises me, given the Malaysian authority’s tendency to ban the most innocent of all books such as Anthony Burgess’ Malayan Trilogy and Karen Amstrong’s A History of God, is that The God Delusion escapes censorship. The escape, of course, is absolutely fine by me.
3 replies on “[1490] Of The God Delusion”
[…] too long ago, just after I finished Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I read a review on the book in The Star. While I do think some of the points are acceptable — […]
[…] Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics and Dawkins’ The God Delusion, have common themes to relate to each other. Beinhocker’s and Dawkins’ share the idea […]
On the case of morality, Mencius say man are born good while XunZi say man are born evil. Laozi say things are constantly change, and Zhuangzi say man are born free. Then Buddhism teaching reach China and ask one to go beyond good and bad.
So are evolution affect religion, or religion has it say on evolution? Or actually both. Because those major religion does shape and derive different outcome for different society that endorse different religion.