If WordPress had a comment filter that said “if you get (almost) the same comment to two separate posts, it’s spam” I would never get any spam at all.

I wonder if that filter exists?

In the absence of an actual copy of The God Delusion, I have had to console myself with reading articles about it. The majority of reviews largely take the book at face value and either support it or oppose it. A few agree with its message but have problems with its tone (see also Richard X).

Many of the more recent reviews, like the one I mentioned in A Transcendent God, quarrel with the very premise of the book. They claim that Dawkins is arguing against a strawman version of Christianity and that he ignores the beliefs of the genuine Christians who have a more sophisticated understanding of God. Their God does not trouble himself with cheap conjuring tricks or answer selfish prayers or, in fact, intervene at all in the day-to-day affairs of mere humans. Their God exists outside human understanding and outside of the laws of the universe as we know them. To even claim that He does not exist is to claim too much understanding.

These reviewers, usually English, rarely acknowledge the political reality in America where, according to Sam Harris,

The United States now stands alone in the developed world as a country that conducts its national discourse under the shadow of religious literalism. Eighty-three percent of the U.S. population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead; 53% believe that the universe is 6,000 years old. This is embarrassing. Add to this comedy of false certainties the fact that 44% of Americans are confident that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years

and

While Muslim extremists now fly planes into our buildings, saw the heads off journalists and aid-workers, and riot by the tens of thousands over cartoons, several recent polls reveal that atheists are now the most reviled minority in the United States. A majority of Americans say they would refuse to vote for an atheist even if he were a “well-qualified candidate” from their own political party. Atheism, therefore, is a perfect impediment to holding elected office in this country (while being a woman, black, Muslim, Jewish, or gay is not). Most Americans also say that of all the unsavory alternatives on offer, they would be least likely to allow their child to marry an atheist.

A piece by Giles Fraser, in today’s Independent, notes that some atheists are “threatened by non-fundamentalist faith” and, as Dawkins often claims,

They reckon it a liberal alibi for fundamentalism, offering a more superficially plausible account of God which serves only to shelter fanatics from the sort of criticism that would put them out of business.

But, rather than joining the battle on the side of the believers, Fraser proposes an alliance.

A contrasting approach would be to work on the assumption that the most effective way to attack bad religion is with an alliance that includes good religion. And thus it’s in the interests of all - including non-believers - for religion to be allowed to present itself in the best possible way. Fundamentalists have become such a threat to us all that a new deal is required between progressives, religious and non-religious.

I have often thought that a religious faith founded on doubt has more in common with atheism than with fundamentalism and would gladly join Fraser’s alliance. Where do I sign up?

I used to love to own books. Everytime I went to the bookshop, I would buy 4 or 5. I can’t bear to throw them or give them away - even the crap ones. I have no space in my house for any more books. Georgina doesn’t see the point. She goes to the library to get books and takes them back when she has read them.

A couple of years ago, I signed up for BookCrossing. The idea is that when you are done with a book you set it free - you just leave it in some public place and put a note on the web site (Bleak House. 3rd bench on the left, Liberty Park, My Town). I never actually set any books free because I couldn’t let go. The will to own them was too great to overcome.

With movies, the opposite is true. I have very little desire to own them; I rent them on PPV or through Netflix instead. They cost about the same as books and the reading/viewing frequency is about the same for books/movies. Why do I want to own books but not movies? Makes no sense to me.

Anyway, in my life so far I have always wanted to own music. With the switch from vinyl to CD, I felt a little bit cheated that the old format was obsolete but I ploughed on anyway. The final straw was when my old car died and I was left with a bunch of cassettes that I could no longer play.

My friends tell me I could transfer all those old songs to some new-fangled format. If they were proper friends they would know why that is not gonna happen. Other friends tell me I could I buy them again in some other proprietary format but that was probably before they read the previous paragaph.

As of today, I no longer want to own music. I am going to rent it.

I just bought a Sansa Rhapsody and from henceforth, I will listen to all the music in the world for $15/month.

The only problem I have now is what to do with all those CDs and LPs cluttering up my living room. Perhaps I will keep them as a reminder of how we used to own music back in the 20th century.

The Boston Globe makes a nice point by reviewing The God Delusion side-by-side with Carl Sagan’s A Personal View of the Search for God and concludes

Dawkins is probably right that fundamentalist religion “actively debauches the scientific enterprise,” but I’ll take Sagan’s more reverent skepticism any day.

A wise man (and closet atheist) once told me that Martin Luther King and Malcom X were necessary to the success of the civil rights movement. Neither man could have done it on his own.

I appreciate Dawkins fervour and passion but I am glad that his is not the only voice.

One day, the president should just kill the stupid thing right there in front of the cameras and the girl scouts and the PETA people. Then it would be worthy of being front page news in the New York Times - or page B7 at the very least.

I am experimenting with the auto-delete comment filter. Your comments will be deleted if they contain any of the words viagra, cialis or mortgage.

You shouldn’t  be talking about those things on my blog anyway.

The New Republic has the answer:

Republicans, on the other hand, pretty much never change. They’re like a Terminator machine (and unlike the governor who played the Terminator and who has dramatically recast his ideology). Crush them in a machine press, or freeze them and blow them into tiny pieces, and they’ll just regroup and keep lurching forward, cutting taxes for the rich and jacking up defense spending.

Ever wonder why that is? It’s because conservatives have an apparatus in place to interpret every election. If Republicans win, it’s because they were conservative. If they lose, it’s because they weren’t. No matter what the facts may be, they will always conclude that the answer is to run further to the right.

Theos, a new Christian think tank, heralded their launch by commissioning a poll from Communicate Research. They started by taking one of Richard Dawkins’ more confrontational statements and asking if people agreed with it: “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”.

And what do you think they found, this Christian think tank?

42% agree with the view of Richard Dawkins that “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”, compared with 44% who disagree.

The UK Polling Report also reports that, on another question in the poll,

53% agree that religion is a force for good in society, compared with 39% who disagree.

but what’s really interesting is how that breaks down by age

69% of over 65s agreed, with only 24% disagreeing. Amonst the youngest age group, under 25s, only 43% agreed with 52% disagreeing.

The recent flurry of humanist literature is partly a reaction to the re-emergence of creationism as a challenge to evolution. But, in this piece, My God Problem, at secularhumanism.org, Natalie Angier wonders why scientists don’t worry about the more central Christian beliefs.

Few scientists, for example, worry about the 77 percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned.

Her essay is so full with evocative phrases like Spockian eyebrow of doubt that I found myself wanting to quote everything.

She takes on the criticism that science can’t explain everything…

I recognize that science doesn’t have all the answers and doesn’t pretend to, and that’s one of the things I love about it. But it has a pretty good notion of what’s probable or possible, and virgin births and carpenter rebirths just aren’t on the list. Is there a divine intelligence, separate from the universe but somehow in charge of the universe, either in its inception or in twiddling its parameters? No evidence. Is the universe itself God? Is the universe aware of itself? We’re here. We’re aware. Does that make us God? Will my daughter have to attend a Quaker Friends school now?

…but the real reason I liked her essay is because it echoes Richard Dawkins plea that atheists stand up for what they believe in. What chance does a closet atheist stand in a culture where this is acceptable?

Now it’s not enough for presidential aspirants to make passing reference to their “faith.” Now a reporter from Newsweek sees it as his privilege, if not his duty, to demand of Howard Dean, “Do you see Jesus Christ as the son of God and believe in him as the route to salvation and eternal life?” In my personal fairy tale, Dean, who as a doctor fits somewhere in the phylum Scientificus, might have boomed, “Well, with his views on camels and rich people, he sure wouldn’t vote Republican!”

How I wish there were a politician with the balls to take her advice!