An acerbic, well-argued case against the undue influence of religion in public life.
A debut nonfiction work surveys religious justifications for violence.
Taking aim squarely at “extremists who are unconstrained by scientific evidence,” Sibilla examines the history of religious justifications for violence. The volume begins with a discussion of how religion emerged as a byproduct of evolutionary biology when early humans “artistically manipulated symbols” into “allegories like thunder as God walking on the solid clouds.” And while subsequent chapters argue against the utility of theology, which the work suggests is based on “magic logic,” Sibilla urges pious readers to recognize the historical context in which their sacred Scriptures are written. Focusing particularly on Abrahamic religions, the book notes that readers must refrain from relying on works that are often poorly translated, use allegories and symbols with specific cultural meanings from thousands of years ago, and are by their very nature hyperbolic. Indeed, much to the author’s lament, despite countless verses in the Christian Bible and the Quran that point toward peace, the history of religion, per his convincing account, chronicles intolerance, violence, and oppression. While careful not to single out any specific theology, the work urges readers to view the themes that unite the world’s largest religions, and the ways in which spiritual bureaucracies and political leaders have leaned toward violence or illogical disinformation. Dedicated to John Rafferty, the former president of the Secular Humanist Society of New York, this volume argues that the “intelligent cosmos” is actually “us,” and calls for the greater use of scientifically informed decisions in social engineering and policy making. While its belief in the fundamental benevolence of science may not ring true to all readers, the work offers a viable alternative to religious divisions that lead to violence and discriminatory public policy outcomes. Having studied theology in the Roman Catholic higher education system of Argentina, Sibilla has a firm grasp of religious ideologies. The book’s astute analysis is made accessible to general readers with an engaging writing style that is accompanied by impressive interdisciplinary research and an eight-page bibliography.
An acerbic, well-argued case against the undue influence of religion in public life.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9798989976737
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Rosesdoor Corp
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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