I am deep into my summer reading, and knocked out The God Delusion last week.
I thought it was very well written, and his points are rock solid.
I thought his one mistake or thing that could be most easily attacked his his large chapter on the evils of religion. I think he way over emphasised the violent religious zealots around today, and used them to bash the far greater of good religious people. (i.e. abortion doctor killers are NOT the norm)
He used the FLDS as an example, when they are clearly a vast minority, and condemned by virtually all religions. He even went so far as to use the Westboro church, failing to recognize that they are universally condemned and basically only consist of a single large inbreed family.

I was overjoyed to read his portion on Thomas Aquanis.
One of the posters here referred his works to me, at which point I critiqued it. It turns out that Dawkins saw the exact same flaws as me, so I guess I felt vindicated and a little smarter.

I thought the book was great. It didn't change my views, as I apparently feel exactly the same as Dawkins for precisely the same reasons. (He did educated me greatly on irreducible complexity, with some more recent studies that blow it out of the water).

Ixtellor

P.S. Yes, yes, I already know I will burn in hellfire, so save those retorts.

P.P.S. He demolishes the "if I am wrong, blah, but if you are wrong blah blah". I wish I had thought of it.

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George W. Bush "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building"

Blasphemy is a victimless crime.

When I was a teenager, I could never really understand people. I was capable of analyzing them, but I could not fathom why so many believed the things they did. Gradually, I developed a little armchair theory that people were equipped in varying degrees with a natural propensity towards dogmatic belief, and that the totality of human history could be characterized as a struggle between dogmatic belieers and free thinkers -- the latter too often burned at the stake or dismembowled in various creative ways at the hands of the former.

Wouldn't you know it, but a few years later out comes a book by a person a whole lot smarter than me detailing meme theory. Talk about something clicking!

I haven't read the god delusion, and the optimist in me leads me towards agnosticism, but I can't imagine it would't make for interesting reading -- at least if the Selfish Gene is any indication.

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I've had a perfectly wonderful evening......... but this wasn't it. -- Marx

Good post lackers my friend

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None. Mod edit to remove profanity. Fools to the left of me, Jokers to the right, here I am stuck up the middle of you!
"Some people have recurrent behavior issues" Catz, proof please?

Not all Religion is a load of bollocks,The United Church of the Latter Day Tangental Tarts is moist yet crisp

Im a Tart, What! you want some of this

Dawkins at Randolph Macon on his Book:


(In the Q&A he tackles the Fallacious "you can't disprove there's a God" floater among others)

Or in part 1 and 2 if the above doesn't work you can find pt 1 (37 min and pt 2 Q&A among these)
Just look for him on that stage in the few pages of videos.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?...1&sa=N&tab=wv#

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I tend to agree with Dawkins but I don't hate religion like he does. He's kind of a dick about it.

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Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
-Dr. Carl Sagan

In the book you discover that he is basically an agnostic.

His big difference is where a typical agnostic might say that the question of :

Is there a god?

Is a 50/50 shot.

For Dawkins its far far far lower. Like 1/99.

He admits, just like I have always thought, that to say "there is no god" with the same conviction that people say "there is a god", are equally flawed.


Ixtellor

P.S. I like science.

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George W. Bush "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building"

Blasphemy is a victimless crime.

I loved The Selfish Gene. And I've seen some lectures by Dawkins where he is amazing. I really ought to read The God Delusion, as I'm sure it cannot be anything less than an interesting read.

Dawkins' smug pomposity runs through this book. The notion of the God delusion has no more legitimacy than to suggest his professed athiesm is a delusion. Dawkins real gripe is with what he perceives to be the rational thought processes of his fellow human beings in buying into religous belief. This, for Dawkins, appears to be the ultimate delusion.

Have you read the book? If so, which arguments don't you find convincing and why?

As the Marxist intellectul John Molyneux put it in comparing The God Delusion with Marx: "Reading Dawkins after Marx is like going from Leo Tolstoy or James Joyce to Kingsley Amis or Agatha Christie. Where Marx packs a book into a paragraph, Dawkins expands a short essay into a large book."

The God Delusion is on the whole extremely derivative. The only exception to this lies in Dawkins's attempt to explain why religion is so widespread in human society, but this attempt is a rather miserable failure. Being a committed evolutionary biologist he feels obliged to frame his explanation in terms of genetic advantage in the process of natural selection, but his blanket hostility to religion also obliges him to deny that religion can be advantageous for individual or societal survival.

He tries to wriggle out of this contradiction by suggesting that religion is a side-effect of a characteristic that he claims is advantageous in the struggle for survival, namely a propensity for children to believe what they are told by their elders. Clearly, this does not withstand criticism. First, the extent to which youthful suggestibility outweighs youthful scepticism, especially into adolescence, is debatable. Second, it is equally debatable whether such suggestibility is, on balance, advantageous. Third, it seems highly likely that both the extent and advantageousness of suggestibility are massively socially conditioned and very different in different societies. Finally, like any theory that explains the behaviour of beliefs of children by the behaviour of beliefs of their parents, it is left with the problem of explaining the parents' disposition in the first place if it is to avoid being caught in an infinite regress.

As Marx pointed out: "The educators themselves must be educated". In other words, Dawkins's explanation turns out to be no explanation at all. Moreover, it is symptomatic of his whole approach that neither in this section nor anywhere else in The God Delusion does Dawkins find time seriously to consider the Marxist theory of religion.

However, intellectual unoriginality and mediocrity are by no means the main objection to this book. The main objection is to the reactionary political conclusions that flow from the weak methodology. As Marx argued in relation to the German philosopher Feuerbach, mechanical materialism invariably leads the door open to idealism, and Dawkins is a particularly clear example of this. Without noticing it, he flip flps from a vulgar materialist genetic determinism in his view of human nature and behaviour in the abstract, to a rampant idealism in his view of the role of religion in concrete historical circumstances. Again and again he makes the mistake of assuming that when people do something in the name of religion it really is religion that is determining their behaviour. His 1998 essay "The Improbability of God" epitomises his approach (available from www.positiveatheism.org/writ/dawkins3.htm)