The God Delusion.
So I have been talking about this to a few people (ie, Cassidy, John, Steve, etc). So I thought I would share it with everyone. There has been a lot of controversy going on about this book by Richard Dawkins, one of my recent heros. For people who believe in god, this will probably shock and anger you and you will close your mind off to it. For
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if Dawkins begins with the gift of empathy as his primary "building block" of morality (aka: religion/defining values), and then commences to scale "Mt. Probable" one step at a time until he can look out over the inhabitants of the cities and mourn their (not his) depravity as if he were Jesus longing to gather Jerusalem under his wings, then isn't he erecting a tower of babel? can this be seen as an attempt to reach God? to conquer God? to be God? I realize that he probably intended to place these metaphors there, to mock all that he lumps into "religion" in a clever sort of spoof. however, I have to wonder what he's offering as a substitute for "all that" - if it's just "questioning" and "skepticism," a "healthy" non-chalance, then he's playing the fool, and that is childish, not childlike.
in this light, if Dawkins actually took it that far, it looks like his argument against the "moderate Christians" was actually an argument against his narrator. if he cannot choose a religion but can only mock those who do, then Dawkin's narrator is "sitting on the fence" according to his own definition (I would argue that sitting on the fence is still religious, but I'm just free-writing now).
The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to view this film as a kind of tongue-in-cheek thing. his serious [dry], michael-moore-ish manner combined with the silly shots of Jesus action figures and the juxtaposition of ironic shots with his narrative (esp, when alluding to Christ) and with antagonistic interviews, and maybe most importantly, his association of himself with Satan within the narrative - making God out to be "unpleasant" and not only insisting that humans can have the mind of God (i.e. "authority"/"the pope"/"the adult"), but inviting them to take a bite out of "the building block of empathy" - the "key-stone" to godlikeness - all hint that the film may be intended to act more as a social experiment than as a manifesto. I can't imagine why he would want to do something like that, in light of the reaction that the Muhammed cartoons provoked...but it may very well be a manifesto.
as far as the two evils goes in the film, I think that he may be over-simplifying - it seems like he's resorting to the method of those he's interviewing by ignoring "the subtleties" that he says science reveals. as far as the reality of that concept, I think it's valid in a sense. I think that self-righteousness and unrighteousness are both equally evil - but I don't think true Christianity fits into either category, though Christians sin in both ways.
Dawkins made a point early in the film about the importance and the beauty of a very religious metaphor: a professor sacrificed his theory for the good of science and in the context of a community built around science. we might see Dawkins as inviting people to sacrifice their ideas of God for similar reasons. Dawkins seems to suggest that our current society cannot support vying religions and should drop all of those values for the values that he operates from. I think this sort of humanism is the primary reason why "democracy" and "freedom" isn't working in iraq - the "insurgents" won't recant. and, apparently, neither will Dawkins.
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