The God Delusion
I'm listening to Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" as an audiobook, and learning a great deal about his arguments against theism generally and monotheism particularly. I've been an admirer of his work for some time, and can honestly say that it was at least in part because of him that I had my brief consideration of atheism.
However...
Dawkins' arguments are not always applicable once you take away many of the notions that monotheism has given us about deity. He is focused single-mindedly on tearing the roots out of the tree of monotheism, and passes over polytheism with a dismissive wave of the "well, who believes that stuff any more anyway?" Over the next several days I'm going to take a close look at some of the arguments Dawkins presents, and try to answer them from the viewpoint of polytheism. In all fairness, I must from the outset concede that almost every unflattering thing he says about monotheistic religion, especially his lambasting of Christianity and Islam, is absolutely true. The God of the Christian Bible is a genocidal tyrant who could only be looked on with utter horror by anyone who carefully considers the book. That book, though, is not the arbiter of truth, religious or otherwise, that Christians want it to be, and I hope to show that while Dawkins is correct insofar as he has focused his gaze on monotheism and the whole assembly of accompanying conjecture, in neglecting polytheism he has in fact dismissed the sort of religion that Carl Sagan described in the quote Dawkins uses to describe a religion based on science rather than fancy.
"A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths." - Carl Sagan
Tommorow - Dawkins' God
However...
Dawkins' arguments are not always applicable once you take away many of the notions that monotheism has given us about deity. He is focused single-mindedly on tearing the roots out of the tree of monotheism, and passes over polytheism with a dismissive wave of the "well, who believes that stuff any more anyway?" Over the next several days I'm going to take a close look at some of the arguments Dawkins presents, and try to answer them from the viewpoint of polytheism. In all fairness, I must from the outset concede that almost every unflattering thing he says about monotheistic religion, especially his lambasting of Christianity and Islam, is absolutely true. The God of the Christian Bible is a genocidal tyrant who could only be looked on with utter horror by anyone who carefully considers the book. That book, though, is not the arbiter of truth, religious or otherwise, that Christians want it to be, and I hope to show that while Dawkins is correct insofar as he has focused his gaze on monotheism and the whole assembly of accompanying conjecture, in neglecting polytheism he has in fact dismissed the sort of religion that Carl Sagan described in the quote Dawkins uses to describe a religion based on science rather than fancy.
"A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths." - Carl Sagan
Tommorow - Dawkins' God