Too many reviews in one place

David Barash tries to review 11 recent books on the religion/science conflict, all in one essay of middling length. It’s not entirely satisfying, nor could it be with that excess of books in so little space, but it does have a convenient short list of what’s been published lately.

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking Press, 2006)

The Creation: An Appealto Save Life on Earth, by Edward O. Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2006)

Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson (University of Chicago Press, 2002)

Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, by Joan Roughgarden (Island Press, 2006)

Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion, by Barbara J. King (Doubleday, 2007)

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis S. Collins (The Free Press, 2006)

Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris (Knopf, 2006)

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer (Basic Books, 2002)

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, by Lewis Wolpert (W.W. Norton, 2007)

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan (The Penguin Press, 2006)

I’ve read most of these, and I roughly agree with most of Barash’s assessments except that he’s much milder in his criticisms than I would be. I was also disappointed in Wolpert’s book, which was a bit too scattered.

Next on my list: Boyer. It’s going to have to wait a little longer, though, until this term ends.

We aim to misbehave

Larry Moran raised an interesting comparison over at Laden’s place. In response to this constant whining that loud-and-proud atheism ‘hurts the cause’, he brought up a historical parallel:

Here’s just one example. Do you realize that women used to march in the streets with placards demanding that they be allowed to vote? At the time the suffragettes were criticized for hurting the cause. Their radical stance was driving off the men who might have been sympathetic to women’s right to vote if only those women had stayed in their proper place.

This prompted the usual cry of the accommodationists: but feminists weren’t as rude as those atheists.

Were the women saying that men were stupid? Were they portraying them as rubes and simpletons? Were they falling into the trap of making themselves resemble the negative stereotypes of women at the time? IIRC, the answers are No, No, and No. Substitute “atheists” for “women” and “theists” for “men,” and the answers are emphatically Yes, Yes, and Yes. It is one thing to be assertive. It is another thing to be gratuitously rude.

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Another edition of “As others see us”

To my surprise, I opened this week’s edition of the university newspaper, and there was an article about me (it’s near the end, on page 18). It’s complimentary, if you think words like “scathing” and “godless” are high compliments, as I do, and it’s also good to see what some of the students think. However! Yes, I say, However!

Those who know the mild-mannered Myers must surely
wonder where the fire comes
from in his blog. He is perhaps
best summarized as a writer
who demands an empiricist
understanding of truth, disdains
misrepresentation of his views,
and insists on a fair shake for
atheists. There is also an element of thrill to his writing,
the thrill of really nailing some
idiot.

Aaaaigh. “Mild-mannered?” I also did a phone interview yesterday with Jason Rennie for his podcast (it’ll air in about a month), and he said afterwards that I sound much different one-on-one than I do on the web. I have got to do something about this horrible image problem — it’s the Wizard of Oz effect. On the web, I’m this giant disembodied head with a stentorian voice, with flames erupting everywhere … and then these people keep insisting on pulling back the curtain and exposing the ordinary, dithering old man with soft-voiced professorial airs.

<sigh>

We are who we are, I guess. It’s just that I wanna be a pirate when I grow up, and my career track seems to be leading me towards the kindly ol’ granpa job, instead.

The soulless atheists exist at VT!

Has anyone heard from Dinesh D’Souza lately? He ought to be offering a humble apology now that the atheists he thought were invisible are turning up on the faculty and in the student body.

Oh, wait … he admits that there were “undoubtedly atheists among the mourners”, but considers his point that atheists have nothing to offer “unrefuted”. So I guess the unbelievers are there, they’re just heartless robots. Thanks, Dinesh! You’re a peach!