The God Delusion is a book written by Richard Dawkins. From the title of the book itself, you could tell that Dawkins is against religion. His main purpose in writing this book “is to demonstrate that people don’t get their morals from religious scriptures” (Dawkins 249). I will not be expressing any of my personal beliefs in this blog for several reasons. One reason would be that I am not Christian and hence not very familiar with the Old Testament and New Testament. I’ll leave the opinions about religion to our class debate and instead in the blog I’ll just be writing about the excerpt itself and Dawkins arguments.
Dawkins starts of the excerpt by taking examples from the Old Testament and poking fun at it. For example, he talks about the story of Noah and how god drowned the people and the helpless animals for no reason. He makes the argument that too many people take these biblical stories too seriously. He shows this with the example of the tsunami that happened in 2004. He talks about how the people that take scriptures seriously, compared the 2004 tsunami to the story of Noah. Dawkins states that the people blamed the tsunami on human sins rather than the scientific reason of the plate tectonic shift. He laughs at their explanation and states that there should be no reason why a divine being like god should care for “petty human malefactions” (Dawkins 238). Besides the example of the tsunami, Dawkins uses many other examples to prove his point.
Dawkins also talks about absolutism in religion. He argues that an extreme view towards religion leads to negative things. I know that I said before that I wouldn’t be expressing any of my opinions, but I have to say that I do agree with Dawkins argument about extremism. I don’t think that extremism is a good thing because it harms more people rather than helping them. He uses the Taliban as an example of religious extremism. I know for a fact that it is against the Muslim religion to kill innocent people for no reason and the Taliban goes totally against that belief and that kind of absolute or extreme religious views leads to nothing besides violence and injustice.
I think that Mr. Richard main goal was to degrade religion. He mainly used the Bible to convey his messages. I do not know much about the Bibles and their story, but I know that if there is no God then how we are created? And by thinking that science or that the Big Bang theory had created us would probably be not the best way to understand how we were created. In my opinion religion invented science, not science created religion. As I said I can’t speak about other religion so well, because I have not read the Bible or the Torah, I read articles on them although. But I have read in the Quran, anything that has been written about astronomy, geology; the moon, scientist have found the same information that the Quran had thousands of years before. For my own readings in the Quran I have found that there is one verse in which they said the moon was split in half. In 1969, couple of American astronauts went up to the moon, and found that the moon was split into halves. Although what I am trying to say is that in my opinion I believe that somewhere there is a God that exists. I don’t think that some things written in the Bible, Torah, or the Quran are merely miracles, they are there to further our knowledge about things. One of my favorite quote is that it is easier to believe in everything or easier to not believe in anything. I think that people should read about other religions, and have an open mind about ideas as well, before making any conclusions.