I’ve started reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I have only read the first two chapters. Already I have found a lot of arguments (especially against fundamentalist religion) that I have thought of myself in my own reasoning when thinking about this subject.
However, I think that (so far), Dawkins has written in too much of an aggressive tone. On the other hand, its refreshing to see an atheist who will back their believes as hard as most religious people do. He encourages readers of the book to not be ashamed of their believes. I think that a lot more of the population are atheists (or at least Agnostic) then what census figures might indicate. They are too afraid (or lazy) to admit it.
The first thing that I was impressed with was how he has gone about his arguments. Treating every one as if it was a science experiment. Giving all the background evidence (of both sides) and looking at it with skeptics eyes. I believe everything must be looked at through skeptics eyes, including normal science. Unfortunately the side effect of his great writing (and the fact he is a great scientist), is the fact he uses really big fucking words. Needless to say, English wasn’t my strongest subject in school. So Wikipedia / Dictionary.com has been a good help for me.
I think the reason I was drawn to reading this book was the fact the Dawkins is an evolutionist. This is one of the most interesting subjects to me, because I (like a lot of the people this book angers) too would like to know how and why we are all here. Just because that question can be easily answered using religion, doesn’t mean that I am going to jump on that bandwagon just because it might put my mind at ease. “Someone else has figured this out and believed it for 2000 years. I’ll just run with that”. I hate that people can be happy with other people’s believes without having looked into alternate answers (or questions) for themselves. “If I was born into Christian family then thats what I have to be because A. Its all I know and B. It will disappoint my parents if I choose to think freely”. This is disgusting in my opinion.
Another thing that is mentioned at the start of the book is the different variations of believes. So for example, I considered myself to be an atheist before I started reading this book. However, I learned that I’m actually Agnostic. I’m not ready to rule a God out 100%. As you can’t rule out the existence of something absolutely. While this might seem that I’m sitting on the fence on the subject, its not. Just as I’m not ruling out the existence of aliens. I think its highly unlikely that they are visiting us every day. But if a UFO landed right in front of me now and aliens walked out, I would go “Wow there really was aliens.” The fact that religious people will say “Its the 100% truth that my version of God is correct” is so far fetched that it annoys me consistently.
Hopefully there will be more subjects to blog about as I continue through the book.
