The God Delusion. Dawkins

Well – just finished this last night – very very good book. Well written and full of ingenious ways to make you think hard about your beliefs.

Some superb research has gone into this and the central hypothesis that he puts forward regarding the likelihood that god doesent exist is compelling.

His tone is somewhat strident at times – and in many ways i wish he had calmed it down a bit…. i can well imagine people of religious persuasion stopping reading after the first few pages of chapter 2 (basically a rather ill tempered sounding tirade) which would be a shame – because there is a lot in this book that every Christian should read and understand.

Ultimately however I still believe in God – but have had my view of organised religions evils reinforced considerably. He is very good on the dangers of organised religious groups (even so called moderate ones) and on the huge fallacy of believing everything in the bible (especially the old testament stuff.)

Where he tended to struggle i found was in his overview of the New testament – he came to the conclusion that it was also crap… but didnt have anything like the same level of evidence to back this conjecture up.

I still believe that if you take all the crap out of the bible (unfortunately this is almost all of it…. in the abscence of Q I would just leave the gospel of Mark to be honest…. and even that has been shaped by human hands too much 🙂 ) you are left with a ground breaking philosophy of life that may well have a divine dimension.

If only Paul hadnt got his stranglehold grip on Christian thought for the next 2000 years on the basis of his delusional beliefs and psychotic hallucinations Christianity would be a very different beast nowadays…. but anyways… thats just my own crazy thoughts on the matter.

Fact is this book should be required reading for all school kids.

I would be very interested in what Wolf has to say about this one – please read it m8… its important!