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
Eve’s story is given the respect it deserves, though her case could use a stronger context.
Biblical gender roles are shaken up in the Garden of Eden.
The story of Adam and Eve is one of the most famous in the Bible. As it goes, the couple could have anything they wanted from the garden, with the exception of the forbidden fruit. But Eve was tempted by a serpent, and she gave the fruit to Adam. They ate it and were banished from the Garden of Eden forever. Much has been made about the role of Eve, the “woman” as temptress who led Adam to sin. However, Davidson delves into this biblical tale with a different tack. Through breaking down words, phrases and scripture in the Bible she sets to prove that Eve is actually the righteous character in this story and that Adam’s role needs revisiting. The author closely looks at names in scripture and what they mean. Adam is “a man or person of low degree, [a] common sort or hypocrite.” Eve is a life giver, or a person who declares or shows life. Parsing out Genesis 2:23, she notes that Adam chose to reject his name and proudly declare himself as “Man” instead, which, in this context has both negative and positive connotations, writes Davidson. Also, Adam chose a life without God, and, as a result, shows defiant qualities–he’s not the one corrupted, as many Bible stories focus on. The question remains: How much of Eve’s victimhood is factual and how much is myth told through a misogynistic culture? If the author could investigate this more deeply, she could make a real case for Eve’s role. However, though Davidson’s intentions are good, the book is often repetitive and could use more cited sources. Referencing texts other than the Bible might flesh out this tale too. But the spirit behind the book is powerful and reminds readers that famous biblical stories often need to be re-examined.
Eve’s story is given the respect it deserves, though her case could use a stronger context.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-2318-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-crafted and thought-provoking.
Intriguing examination of the life-and-death difference between morality and ethics.
Gustafson contends that readers will be used to thinking of the terms “morality” and “ethics” as largely interchangeable. At the very least, most see both terms in a positive light. The author argues, however, that morality has been a misused and deadly social construct throughout the ages. “Morality and ethics differ,” says the author, “because morality supports civilization and ethics supports life.” Morality, according to Gustafson, is a civilization’s way of determining good and evil. Since morality changes from one civilization to another (and differs within civilizations), it is subject to abuse. Morality, he explains further, supports the “dominator system,” whereby everyone and everything is rated and valued according to a civilization’s arbitrary sense of good and bad. Hence “morality,” as the differentiation between good and evil, has been used throughout the centuries to condone everything from slavery, to racism in America, to the Nazi campaign against the Jews. Quite the contrary, writes Gustafson–ethics supports not a particular civilization, but life itself. Mercy and humility are examples of ethical behavior and thinking, which seek to serve those marginalized by society. The author points toward Native-American cultures as examples of ethical ones, in that they served the community as a whole as well as the natural world. Moreover, he holds up Jesus Christ as a foremost exemplar of ethics–“Jesus was not moral. He was ethical...because he rejected morality’s death-dealing function and supported life instead.” Overall, the book is well-written and pulls in a wide array of authors and thinkers. Gustafson’s work is not meant to be a treatise countering every argument, but instead introduces the concept of this morality-ethics dichotomy. In the end the author calls upon readers to be aware of the dominator system they live in, and how morality is used to support it, not life.
Well-crafted and thought-provoking.Pub Date: July 31, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7414-5404-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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