God delusion

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I stumbled in this book while in India, I’m not really into religion related books but I’ve heard about Richard Dawkins for his better known “The Selfish Gene” (which I haven’t read yet) and so I gave it a try.

Dawkins is an atheist who tries, in this book, to confute both existence of God (or Gods, depending on the religion) and the usefulness of religion as a moral standpoint. The topic is huge and delicate and Dawkins does nothing to smooth his neat position against religion; since I already shared most of the author’s thoughts this approach didn’t bother me but I figure that most of believing people reading this book would likely be irritated by that.

That said I think the arguments are compelling; for example, when dealing with the origin of life, the author opposes the evolutionary explanation (ever more complicated beings built upon previous ones) to intelligent design (complex beings created from scratch by an even more complex supernatural one, creating though an explanation loop). There is also a section in which the moral value of religion is taken into account and Dawkins analyze both Bible’s Old and New Testment; the author’s writing style describing some of Bible’s episodes is simply hilarious!

One of the last chapters is also dedicated to religion’s role in children education (worrying the examples Dawkins cites about creationists schools) and its influence in the perspective of this young “believers” (the book in fact states that there are no muslim/catholic/jewish children, there are only children son of muslim/catholic /jewish parents).

To sum up I consider it a well written book raising several, well supported issues, even though Dawkin’s style will be hardly digested by the most religious readers (assuming there will be!).

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