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The God Delusion | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Black Swan
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy Used: £3.60
You Save: £5.39 (60%)
New (36) Used (9) from £3.60
Rating:  763 reviews
Sales Rank: 183
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed with additions
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 1.6
ISBN: 055277331X
EAN: 9780552773317
ASIN: 055277331X
Publication Date: May 21, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Wisdom? Truth? Dawkins has something to say to you October 4, 2006
P. Ditta
55 out of 74 found this review helpful
For the reviewer who asks whether it is possible for the God that someone as wonderful as Jesus believed in to not exist? It's entirely possible.
Dawkins doesn't say he's right because he's clever and that's his opinion and that's that. He claims a better grounding in logic and that demonstrates the weight of evidence on his side.
You might want to satisfy yourself with the moral teachings of a religion that allows, in fact encourages, genocide, rape, wholeseale destruction of entire biospheres and child murder, but please don't preach to the rest of us that christianity, islam, judaism, mormonism or any other faith first, evidence later (or not) religion offers any kind of relevant morality.
If you are willing to keep an open mind, this is an essential read. If not, well, sorry, but there's no hell for me to say "to hell with you" and there's no God for you to pray to who will smite a blasphemer like me. Absolutists beware; this is a book for people who actually like to think.
And Dawkins doesn't expect you for one second to just blindly agree with him. He expects nothing more than that you should find out for yourself. Which is more than you can say for just about every organised religion you could name.
In a world where religion is a shadow over all our lives, it's well past time for the rationalists to take the world back, before mindless hate, intolerance and bigotry claim us all.
Preaching to the converted September 28, 2006
John Self (Belfast, NI)
210 out of 286 found this review helpful
If you're reading this, the chances are you're either a 'radical atheist' (the preferred term of Dawkins' late friend Douglas Adams, to whom the book is dedicated), hoping that The God Delusion will give you a good satisfying dose of anti-religion rhetoric; or you're a devout believer, hoping to be roundly appalled and outraged.
Either way, you could be disappointed. For the first half or more, The God Delusion is more rigorous and scientifically demanding than we have been led to expect (Jeremy Paxman in interviewing Dawkins called it 'entertaining': well, yes and no). Dawkins goes to great, and occasionally tiresomely great, lengths to detail why the existence of the universe, the development of life and the variety of creation can be comfortably explained by science and probability. And then he gets to grips with traditional justifications for the existence of God, disposing of them in his own neat way. Perhaps these sections seemed superfluous to me as someone who is satisfied that Dawkins is right and there is no God; and doubtless they will seem equally superfluous - in another sense - to those who believe in God and not in Dawkins.
(It's worth saying at this point that when Dawkins means 'God', he means a personal, supernatural creator of the religious scriptures, a God-being rather than the more progressive notion of God as something nebulous that exists in all of us. This is after all the commonly understood meaning of God, which children are taught and most Christian, Islamic and Jewish adults continue to believe in. For sophisticated modern believers, who do not take the scriptures literally, Dawkins doesn't really regard you as religious at all; and you take that as an insult or compliment as you see fit.)
All this is worthwhile but when the book was more than half over, by page 200, and we were still on "The Roots of Religion," I couldn't help wondering when it would all get going. I needn't have worried. Dawkins, who has been quite restrained up until now - his disrespect limited to the odd sneer of 'faith-heads' or referring to the God of the Old Testament as a 'psychotic delinquent' - lets fly with the passion of his true feelings once the subject turns to morality.
And it is a thrilling, invigorating display. Dawkins systematically dismantles all arguments for morality being connected to religious belief in any sense (indeed shows how diametrically opposed much religious teaching is to widely accepted morality), addresses tricky issues like the Darwinian explanation for altruism, disposes of a few sacred cows along the way (Mother Teresa is "sanctimoniously hypocritical [with] cock-eyed judgement," God an "evil monster"), and horrifies us with religion's historical and present-day cruelties and injustices.
The other principal benefit of The God Delusion is that it gives us an opportunity to see all Dawkins' religious arguments in one place, having previously experienced them only in snippets of other books, newspaper articles and TV programmes. And he wastes no time in reiterating some of his favourite rhetoric:
"I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase 'Christian child' or 'Muslim child' should grate like fingernails on a blackboard."
"I have found it amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and almost all the other gods that have been invented since the dawn of man. I just go one god further."
And having put the fear of, well, God into us by detailing the dark side of religious belief (Dawkins would argue that there is no bright side: if your good morals and deeds are determined solely by a God you believe in, he argues, you are an "immoral person we should steer a clear passage around"), he is too professional to leave us floundering. Instead he injects the last ten pages with a soaring essay on the passion of science, which "widens the window" on what we can see, and leaves us with a lasting taste of the freedom that can be ours if we can only dare to think for ourselves. It is reminiscent of this beautiful passage from his earlier book Unweaving the Rainbow, which seems a good place to end, letting the wonder of what's really there speak for itself:
"Fling your arms wide in an expansive gesture to span all of evolution from its origin at your left fingertip to today at your right fingertip. All across your midline to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing but bacteria.
"Many-celled, invertebrate life flowers somewhere around your right elbow. The dinosaurs originate in the middle of your right palm, and go extinct around your last finger joint. The whole history of Homo sapiens and our predecessor Homo erectus is contained in the thickness of one nail clipping. As for recorded history; as for the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Jewish patriarchs, the dynasties of Pharaohs, the legions of Rome, the Christian Fathers, the Laws of the Medes and Persians which never change; as for Troy and the Greeks, Helen and Achilles and Agamemnon dead; as for Napoleon and Hitler, the Beatles and Bill Clinton, they and everyone that knew them are blown away in the dust of one light stroke of a nail file."
The Moral Delusion October 6, 2006
Graham Cooke (Dublin, Ireland)
196 out of 267 found this review helpful
Most of the one and two star reviewers here do not appear to have even read this book. Statements like "since there is no god it is illogical to talk about human rights" show a lack of understanding. The existence or non-existence of God has nothing to do with morals, nor human rights. In fact, many religions have stood steadfastly in the way of human rights in the past. The Bible is full of horribly derogatory statements about women, and is used as an excuse to preach fire-and-brimstone hate against homosexuals in the USA. If you want to look for modern morals, holy books are the last place to find guidance.
Although Dawkins runs the risk of preaching to the converted, his concise and well researched argument for a world without religion is fascinating reading. It is written with logic, humour and David-Attenborough-like enthusiasm. I doubt many religious people who base their morals on ancient texts will pick up this book and read it with a genuinely open mind, but I dearly hope many do.
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