Ablogalypse Now

The God Delusion

Yet another addition to my ever-growing stack of must-reads.

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The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Houghton Mifflin (October 18, 2006)

From the Publisher:

Discover magazine recently called Richard Dawkins "Darwin's Rottweiler" for his fierce and effective defense of evolution. Prospect magazine voted him among the top three public intellectuals in the world (along with Umberto Eco and Noam Chomsky). Now Dawkins turns his considerable intellect on religion, denouncing its faulty logic and the suffering it causes.

He critiques God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly.

Dawkins has fashioned an impassioned, rigorous rebuttal to religion, to be embraced by anyone who sputters at the inconsistencies and cruelties that riddle the Bible, bristles at the inanity of "intelligent design," or agonizes over fundamentalism in the Middle East -- or Middle America.

The God Delusion Book Tour

The Council for Secular Humanism is pleased to announce Professor Dawkins U.S. book tour schedule for The God Delusion. Many of these tour dates are on university campuses.

• October 16 University of Kansas Lawrence, KS.
• October 18 New York Academy of Science, New York, NY.
• October 19 Harvard Bookstore Reading and The First Parish Church Cambridge, MA.
• October 20 PopTech Conference, Camden, ME.
• October 21 McGill University Montreal, QC.
• October 23 Philip Thayer Memorial Lecture, Randolph-Macon Woman's College Lynchburg, VA.
• October 24 Politics & Prose, Washington, DC.
• October 26 University of Washington Bookstore, Seattle, WA.
• October 27 Powell's Books, Portland, OR.
• October 28 Skeptics Society at Cal-Tech and Beckman Auditorium Los Angeles, CA.
• October 30 City Arts & Lectures, The Palace of Fine Arts San Francisco, CA.
• November 2 Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA.
• November 3-4 University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
• November 6 Salk Conference, San Diego, CA.

America 2014: An Orwellian Tale

"Picture a totalitarian United States just ten years from now: With no end in sight to the War on Terror, a fourth-term President George Blush rules without restraint. The Constitution has been replaced with a "Patriotic Citizen's Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" and America has been renamed "God's United States." The Blush Administration has finally "freed" America of its "treasonous" opposition party, "subversive" media and "obstructionist" judges."

"In this starkly terrifying political thriller, Winston Smith is a young, successful producer of patriotic commercials for the Department of Homeland Security. While working to fulfill his dream of making a contemporary film version of "1984," he runs afoul of government censors, is forced to stand trial in a nightmarish courtroom, and faces brutal execution in a privatized prison. Rescued by a mysterious, powerful young woman and a band of teenaged computer hackers, he joins the Resistance and becomes swept up in a deadly struggle to undermine his government's stranglehold on power and information."

--execerpt from "America 2014: An Orwellian Tale" , by Dawn Blair

Although it's a work of fiction, at the rate we are currently progressing, er, I mean regresssing, it may not be too far off the mark.