The God Delusion - the book by leadb

GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

The God Delusion - the book

POSTED BY: LEADB
UPDATED: Sunday, June 10, 2007 19:00
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Sunday, June 10, 2007 7:00 PM

A few weeks past,
CALHOUN
opened a thread titled:
The Root of all Evil : The God Delusion
Based on Dawkins' 'presentation' of a TV documentary, you can find the link here:

http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=2&t=28866

The discussion was interesting, and ran on over 300 posts; given how slow the thread was to open, I've decided to open a new thread on the general topic, but instead on the 'book'...

Richard Dawkins The God Delusion 2006 Houghton Fifflin Co ; all quotes from this book marked **.

Much of the focus of the discussion in the above thread was on the title of the documentary; many folks felt it was unreasonable to claim anything to be the root of 'all' evil. Apparently, neither does Dawkins:
'In January 2006 I presented a two-part television documentary on British television (Channel Four) called Root of All Evil? From the start, I didn't like the title. Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.' **(pg 1)
So, that earned a few reclamation points from me; apparently, he didn't have creative control on the title of the documentary. Unfortunately, that really put me off from pursuing too hard the documentary; I might give it watch if I have a chance.

Regarding the book, it's probably what you would expect from a firm atheistic scientist. He's obviously very intelligent and had given this a great deal of thought. He clearly believes that God does not exist, and provides a 'no holds barred' approach to convincing others that they should free themselves from religion.

One thing he does very well is to separate the science from the religion/belief statements. For instance, he is very good at indicating where the science stops and his thoughts and projections continue, which is important as he is very good at not overstating the conclusions which science, as known, can reasonably support.

For the moment, I'm not going to go into too many specifics; ultimately, he does resort to a well reasoned, but subjective, statement for why religous beliefs shoud be set aside.

One section I found to be very interesting, though, was the "Does our Moral Sense have a Darwinian Origin?" ** (pg 214) He presents a very interesting summation of how it could develop under such conditions; I can't do a summary justice in the time available so I'll simply leave it at that for the moment.
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Well, have at it; if anyone else has had a chance to read the book or subsequently catch the documentary, have at it. Or comment on the sections above...

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