| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Richard Dawkins | ||||
| ||||
Dawkins has a new book? Oh my God I have to buy it immediately!
I love Richard Dawkins! And it is hilarious watching as he allows Stephen's alter ego to "argue" with him. It looks like Dawkins is having a lot of fun with it.
BTW I am currently reading The Evolution of God which I am finding fascinating since I have studied religions, and their origins, most of my life.
I have a real problem buying books. I can't stop.
ReplyDeleteI have RD's new book, but my husband beat me to it and is reading it now. He says it's fabulous. I also have The Evolution of God, but it has to wait until I finish my current read - Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, by Charles P. Pierce. Great book - I highly recommend it. You'll learn a lot and have some chuckles along the way. I recently finished The Family (Jeff Sharlet), Republican Gomorrah (Max Blumenthal) and God's Profits (Sarah Posner) All highly recommended!
Thank you sir, I enjoyed that interview very much!! I will look for his book, as well as the other one you mentioned, next time I am at the library.
ReplyDeleteI LOVE reading about this kind of stuff too!
I loved Dawkins until I read his book and discovered he is just as frothingly bigoted toward Moslems as the Christian right--as well as being criminally ignorant of Islam. Anyone who wants to go nuke billions goes on my enemies list.
ReplyDeleteI think you would really enjoy Chris Hedges's "I Don't Believe in Atheists". Hedges contends that Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris are creating a new form of fundamentalism with its own fantasies of its own moral superiority and some truly ludicrous assumptions about human nature. Secular fundamentalists who seek to divide the world into those who are worthy and those who should be condemned and eradicated are just as dangerous as religious fundamentalists. It's truly a fascinating book, and I highly recommend it.
After reading it, I quit calling myself an "atheist" since I realized that thanks to my Buddhist leanings I do actually believe in a universal spiritual 'something' that can be found in all of us ("the god in me salutes the god in you"). BTW, Hedges is also the author of "American Fascists" which is a wonderful examination of the religious right.
Midnight Cajun
So Gryphen, if you have been reading scholarly works about religion, could you comment on whether it's possible that SP could have been reading C. S. Lewis for his "Christian apologist" thoughts? And finding him "deep"? Or did she find him "deep" as a children's writer? This was one of the few writers she mentioned, apart from "all of them" in response to Couric's hostile qu "what do you read?"
ReplyDeleteGryphen,
ReplyDeleteIs your God male or female?
10cats in MD
Dawkins really is good
ReplyDeleteI've read all of Dawkins' books I could get my hands on and have never heard him say anything remotely close to advocating nuking Muslims or anybody else. Midnight Cajun must be thinking of somebody else, maybe Pat Robertson?
ReplyDeleteNor is Dawkins criminally ignorant of Islam any more than a Christian is and probably less so. But why would Dawkins or any other sane person want to do an in depth study of any hocus-pocus sky fairy religion anyway?
Sarah Q.
I haven't heard "nuking Muslims" either, but, I'm sorry Sarah, "hocus-pocus sky fairy religion" sounds a wee bit fundamentalist i.e. looking down on other belief systems (unless you're being sarcastic).
ReplyDeleteI think that's what MC was getting at. I'm vaguely familiar with some of the authors he mentioned and they exhibit the same "sureness" we know fundies for:
1) Absolute confidence in their belief (remember, the nonexistence of god(s) is as untestable a hypothesis as his/her/its/their existence); and
2) Ridicule of other belief systems. Are views that *ALL* religion is harmful, dangerous, etc. really that different from thinking that every religion is Satanic but one's own?
I haven't read Dawkins, but can you understand why someone would assume that he's a "secular fundamentalist" when he's written a book called "The God Delusion"?
Still, he has his points, and he's saner than SP and her ilk.