In this unabashedly polemical collection of 14 essays, atheist commentator Loftus continues the diatribe he began against the Christian faith in Why I Became an Atheist (2008) and The Christian Delusion (2010).
The basic argument he and his contributors—including Robert Price, Hector Avalos and Richard Carrier—use to debunk Christianity is what he calls the “Outsider Test for Faith,” which asks people to evaluate their own religious faith “with the same level of skepticism they use to evaluate other faiths.” By applying the strictest logic to the literal word of the Bible, the essays demonstrate why 2,000 years of Christianity is more than enough. Christian beliefs in such things as miracles, Immaculate Conception and the Resurrection are “absurd and bizarre.” The Bible is an outdated text that represents “norms, practices and a conception of the world very different from ours” and “endorses everything from genocide to slavery.” As a work set down by humans, Christian Scripture is “fantasy literature” and the biblical God “nothing more than a memorable old monster.” The central doctrines pertaining to hell and repentance are dangerous for the way they “intimidate people into belief” and offer justification to the unscrupulous to perform unspeakable acts of cruelty. Taken together, the essays show how Christianity should not be used as the basis for notions of right and wrong; science, offers a much better foundation for a system of morality. The arguments advanced against Christianity are not new, but Loftus’s book is admirable for its bluntness and single-minded drive toward the belief that science—itself a human construct and thus as subject to flaws as religion—is mankind’s saving grace. Provocative but not earth-shaking.
Pub Date: July 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-61614-413-5
Page Count: 435
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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