You needn’t buy the total Dawkins package to glory in his having the guts to lay out the evils religions can do....
Dawkins’s passionate disavowal of religion and his “I can no other answer make” statement that he is an atheist—and why you should be, too.
Dawkins, eminent Oxford scholar, defender of evolution (The Ancestor’s Tale, 2004) and spokesman for science (Unweaving the Rainbow, 1998), delivers ten chapters arguing the non-existence of god, along with documentation of the atrocities religions have wrought. This is exceptional reading—even funny at times. (A footnote declaims that in the promise of 72 virgins to Muslim martyrs, “virgins” is a mistranslation of “white raisins of crystal clarity.”) By God, Dawkins means a supernatural creator of the universe, the prayer-listener and sin-punisher, and not the vague metaphoric god some invoke to describe the forces that govern the universe. Accordingly, Dawkins focuses heavily on the monotheistic religions with quotations from the Bible and Koran that sanction genocide, rape and the killing of unbelievers. Dawkins is concerned about fundamentalism in America, a phenomenon that stigmatizes atheists and is at odds with the Founding Fathers who ordained the separation of church and state. (Jefferson said, “The Christian God . . . is cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.”) He worries that we abuse the vulnerability of children (who are primed via natural selection to trust elders) by indoctrinating them in religions they are too young to understand. Indeed, natural selection is Dawkins’s strong card to explain why you don’t need a god to account for the diversity, complexity and grandeur of the natural world. In other chapters, he uses evolutionary psychology and game theory to account for why we don’t need a god to be good. He also conjectures that religion may have arisen as a byproduct of the ways our brains have evolved, and he invokes “memeplexes” (pools of memes, the cultural analogues of genes) to account for the spread of religious ideas.
You needn’t buy the total Dawkins package to glory in his having the guts to lay out the evils religions can do. Bible-thumpers doubtless will declare they’ve found their Satan incarnate.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-68000-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
Accounts of dreams, waking visions, and near-death experiences featuring the figure of Jesus, with a running commentary by psychotherapist Sparrow. Sparrow (Lucid Dreams, not reviewed) believes that many people dream of Jesus and that these dreams play an important role in their psychological growth. Here he offers a large number of personal testimonies, based on more than five years of research in the United States. He divides his material into seven chapters, dealing with such topics as initial encounters with the Christ figure, physical and emotional healings, and confrontations bringing about a change of attitude during the experience itself. We read of visions in which individuals are personally addressed by Jesus and inundated with light, and of healings, as in the case of a woman who, after her dream of Jesus, found she could experience orgasm without fear. The reports are brief, and Sparrow's text links them together, as he points up significant themes and inspirational lessons. His book is a celebration of the kind of American religiosity that values individual experience more than the experience and wisdom handed down through the centuries of tradition. Sparrow's Jesus can be whoever we want him to be, the Buddha, or even a ``luminous form'' of ourselves. The result is a vapid, androgynous figure in flowing robes who essentially reassures. Sparrow fudges when he claims that he is not writing theology but goes on to equate his stories uncritically with the New Testament appearances of Jesus. Furthermore, he mentions such Christian teachers as St. Teresa of Avila and St. Ignatius Loyola but refers neither to their important criteria for evaluating visions nor to their warnings against the very real psychological and spiritual danger of delusion in such matters. Superficial treatment of a significant religious and psychological theme.
Pub Date: March 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09713-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
Having brought peace to the strife-torn Middle East in his last outing, Joshua and the Holy Land (1993), the mysterious Joshua returns to set his sights on an even more challenging task: reforming that Sodom-and-Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson—New York City. Joshua arrives, and as he walks up Broadway he encounters a young runaway named Charlene who has turned to prostitution. In the wink of an eye, he frees her from her pimp and convinces her that she should give up life on the streets and return to school. Continuing on with his new convert, Joshua enters Central Park, where he meets a woman who suffers from incipient Alzheimer's. One touch and she too is cured—and she agrees to adopt Charlene and send her to a suburban boarding school. Walking on alone, Joshua emerges on the far end of the park in Harlem. He plays basketball with a group of African-American youths who touch him with their good hearts and lack of hope. He begins teaching them the skills to start their own businesses, but, of course, it's not enough. Fortunately, the husband of the senility victim he healed is a wealthy developer, who out of gratitude now agrees to buy up and redevelop the entire neighborhood. Joshua's greatest miracle, though, is that in all this urban renewal no one is displaced. And so it goes: As the development project proceeds, Joshua roams about doing good, helping a mother's drug-addicted son, comforting a dying AIDS patient, battling the evil influences of the occult, fighting Satan in the guise of the mercurial Lucius Fabian, all the while spouting ever higher platitudes like a politician on a bad day. More blandly inspirational fare for Girzone's rather sizable readership.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47420-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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