Der Gotteswahn

I loved this book when I read it for the first time, when I was about 18, as a young and newly "converted" atheist. Re-reading it now, as a less young atheist, I find a lot of issues with it. The first 4 chapters of the book are mostly okay, and overall I agree with what Dawkins says. In particular, he does a decent job showing how some of the most popular "arguments for God" can be easily dismissed. He doesn't really show why "God almost certainly doesn't exist", despite the title of chapter 4, but he does again a decent enough good job showing why God is not necessary as an explanation for "life, the universe, and everything". The rest of the book, however, is a lot less convincing, in an of itself, but also considering the author's recent "feats". When he talks about the roots of religion and morality, he leans a lot on Darwinian evolution (which is not necessarily bad) and evolutionary psychology (which is, to say the least, very problematic), but lacks an anthropological perspective. He's certainly right to denounce mainstream religions for their misogyny and homophobia, but this feels really insincere coming from someone who's a misogynist (despite the fact that he claims to be a "feminist") and a transphobe, as he has showed plenty of times in the past decade. But the worst part of the book is definitely the section where he talks about the "mild" child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, comparing it to the more "severe" abuse of religious indoctrination. He seems to think that physical and psychological abuse are two distinct things, instead of being interconnected. To conclude, I agree with Dawkins that God doesn't exist, but there are better books to read on the subject, and definitely better people to listen to.

I hate this book, and it's a prime example of why the New Atheists harmed any movement of any sort by atheists. It just provides so many examples of the many of the reasons why people get so upset about anti-theism (which, for the record, I have a complicated relationship with because of New Atheists), particularly as their anti-theism is based entirely in forms of bigotry and a failure to understand the world around them. The anti-theism of people like Dawkins and his ilk does not, in any capacity, explore the connections between (primarily organised) religion and their societies.

Starting with the more minor problems: I don't know what editor allowed a book, even in 2006, to include URLs in the text. Even on the ebook version, the links were there without the ability to click them. I also don't know why the editor even encouraged Dawkins to keep many of his notes, which were incredibly disparaging to many people. They were so elitist and pompous; they were almost all entirely irrelevant.

Oh, and the fourth chapter does exactly nothing of what he claims it does. It's just a continuation of the third chapter and doesn't even contribute to a conversation of why there "almost certainly is no god."

The rest of the book is pure bigotry and abuse/rape/CSA apologia, so this is probably going to be a messy range of thoughts:

I can't even begin to describe the amounts of rage I felt reading him try to say that "mild paedophilia" is a thing in order for him to be able to focus on "religious" abuse while trying to make it out to be "worse" (as if there are hierarchies of abuse -- how despicable) or him trying to separate physical, mental, and emotional abuse (and into "religious abuse") when they're all inherently connected in some form.

He routinely uses the "protect the children" trope that the right uses except for atheism, including saying that we should take children away from their parents for "indoctrinating" them. He has zero concept of the abuse that took place in residential schools, and he acts like we've since stopped doing any of the most harmful things that we've ever done to people (e.g., slavery).

And all of his supposed "support" of gay people (because he never considers the existence of anyone outside of binary lesbian and gay people) is entirely hollow once you know what his stance has been on trans people in the years that followed publication. How can any of his "support" really be genuine? How can any of his belief to "let people be as they are and want to be" even be real when he simply won't? I wouldn't have believed him in 2006, and I certainly don't today.