A bracing, comprehensive deconstruction.
A clinical assessment of the human origins of organized religion.
Khan’s nonfiction debut tackles the fundamentally mundane origins of the broad concept of invisible deities. He looks at sacred texts of the major modern monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and sets them in the broader historical context of the polytheism from which they sprang, leading to various structural and thematic similarities. The goal is to bring these and all faiths in the supernatural down to Earth, linking them with the power-related needs of human rulers and societies. “Mighty empires,” he writes, “propagated the myth of religion and mediator god-kings to keep a heavy-handed grip on innocent people.” In interpretive and rhetorical moves that will be familiar to readers of so-called New Atheist texts—e.g., Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith—Khan systematically picks apart the absurdities of major religions. “If God insists on proving His existence through angels,” he asks, “why not send angels that can be seen and heard on the witness stand?” Or: “What if an atheist hits the jackpot without any supplication to God?...Do we call it God’s mercy? No, we call it luck.” He looks at a wide spectrum of later, interpretive stories from the likes of Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and various commentaries on the Quran. Khan’s tone throughout is calm and approachable, but his larger purpose is serious: while illuminating the arbitrary and man-made nature of organized religion, he simultaneously underscores the tremendous and often harmful power those organized religions still wield in the world, altering national policy and sometimes severely affecting daily lives (he points out, for example, that the constitutions of seven U.S. states forbid government office to atheists). Atheists will appreciate this unified, readable treatise on the choice to renounce religion, while religious readers with questions about the validity of their faiths will also find a great deal of thought-provoking material.
A bracing, comprehensive deconstruction.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-6883-9
Page Count: 212
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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