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Tuesday, January 02, 2007

One God Further

Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion, has been out for a while. I haven't read it yet. But I will before long. Here's a fun little video clip of Stephen Colbert interviewing Dawkins.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I read it shortly after it came out. He's, um, preaching to the converted in me, but I thought it was excellent. And almost airtight. Almost. I've already had several arguments about the book with people who haven't read it...

Brenda Schmidt said...

Funny, I thought about ordering this book the other day after a visit to PoetryReviews.ca. There Shane N. said it was the best book he read in the past year. So I clicked on his link to Amazon and the review there made me hee and haw a while before deciding against it, the words "surprisingly intolerant" finally putting me off.

John said...

Yah, I'm in the choir, too. Still and all, it's occasionally good to read intelligent writing by someone I agree with.

Brenda, as I ain't read it yet, I can't really comment on "surprising intolerant," but I can say that in my experience of Dawkins' writings the man has no patience for fools.

Anonymous said...

No, he certainly doesn't, which is a big part of why I like his writing and this book in particular as much as I do. There are some things it's okay not to tolerate. I'm with Dawkins in thinking that our society has been suprisingly tolerant when it comes to the intersection of private religious belief and public policy.

That said, calling him "intolerant" is really broadstroke. If he were advocating the annihilation of religious texts as myth and art, I'd agree, but he's quite explicitly against such extremism.

Read the book, Brenda. There are intolerant (see, everyone can play this game!) ignorami out there who will tell you that Nietzsche is a Nazi, too. Doesn't mean they know what the hell they're talking about. Come to think of it, _On the Genealogy of Morals_ or _Beyond Good and Evil_ would be excellent companion pieces to _TGD_. Something that was a striking omission in the book, actually, is Nietzsche, whom Dawkins doesn't mention once. Very odd in a book on atheism.

Brenda Schmidt said...

Ok, I'm sold. I'll order it. I've got The Selfish Gene 30th Anniversary Ed. sitting here. I should be able to get through it at least once before TGD gets here.

I think I'll order Guy Gavriel Kay's new one while I'm at it. A little fantasy to balance things out.