Lest I'm labelled with presenting my own Straw Man Dawkins in return...
...Dawkins states claims on the bad ways religion affects society like the crusades or 9/11... And if you say the Crusades were the Christians fault for attacking in 1101 AD or the Muslims fault for attacking 300 years EARLIER in the process almost conquering Spain it doesn't matter because BOTH groups were religious...
...And Dawkins absolutely destroys the ideas of creationism and intelligent design in favor of evolution... anyone that has read 'The Language of God' by Collins may have to finally give some credence to it. CS Lewis did 100 years earlier...
...and finally there are some interesting ideas at the end wondering why humans are predisposed to believing in God and religion...
1) About how children are born predisposed to believe in the duality of body and spirit from birth... (Useful, he states, only in the past when physical survival depended on this sense of dualism but to be done away with in modern society... OR is that possibly a sign that a God wants us to be able to commune with Him if we're set up as humans to believe in some sort of duality...?)..
2) About how belief as an important tool for survival so they take serious the command to steer clear of swimming with alligators or playing with fire... (Used instead to believe in the whole set of belief systems of their parents which, as is established over and over in this book, can be absolutely absurd)...
...BUT he doesn't even answer any of the criticisms that run outside of his specialty in science... Example of this would be when someone argued that without God there is no absolute judge of right and wrong and thus a group of people could decide anything could be right or wrong so long as it worked for them. Ie. Hitler is the same as Gandhi. His answer was that Kant had these moral imperatives that, if followed, would assure that immoral actions could not be done... ummm... I studied Kant in university and the problem to the theory is that people have no reason to follow these moral imperatives than their own selfish ambition...
... another example would be his theory on how 'love thy neighbor' OR 'love your enemies' really meant only as far as fellow Jews... meaning he really hasn't read the New Testament...
...or when he says how atheism has nothing but positive effects for society... lest we forget that he justifies in this very book the grounds for abortion all the way up till birth...
... A couple great ideas in the midst of a whole lot of frustrating ones.
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