And I'll begin with the preface.....
In his preface, Dawkins throws a lot of issues out, plays a few language games with us "atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind" (p4) etc, but his main focus is 4 of what he calls "conscience raisers", and I'll try to respond to each in turn.
1) You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral and intellectually fulfilled. (p1)
Yes I’m sure atheists can be jolly nice people. Though what “happy” means, or “balanced” is compared against, or “moral” means, or “intellectually fulfilled” necessitates, he doesn’t flesh out in the preface.
2) The power of cranes? (p2)
Being a bit thick I didn't quite grasp this, but I suspect that its something to do with our sense of awe at marvellous natural systems, but perhaps I didn’t understand. He promises later chapters will clarify on this.
3) There is no such thing as a Christian child. (p3)
Dawkins says it is wrong to label (for example) the child of Anglican parents as Anglican.
Two thoughts on this.
- Firstly, he presupposes religion is entered into solely by conscious choice. This does seem at odds with his observations (p3) that some people are religious because they have been indoctrinated as children.
- Secondly, I have to dispute the statement, however this is complex. We'd be utterly foolish to label Christian all that calls itself Christian, and yet where this self-declaration is sincere (and ironically therefore not self-declaration but God's calling), from a covenental perspective we'd be right to label a child Christian.
4) Its time for some atheist pride. (p3)
With regard to 4) It seems to me the atheists are thoroughly out of the closet already. Their writing and thinking dominates so much of classroom life and political debate, where of course they implement a wholly new form of indoctrination.
Dawkins sets out an intended goal for the book, "If this book works as I intend, religious leaders who open it will be atheists when they put it down. What presumptious optimism!" (p5) And a lovely little word-game follows: "Of course dyed in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature..." In other words, if I disagree with him he's going to call me names like stupid. Charming. If rational argument fails, let's call each other names.
One thing I should mention: Dawkins is clear his truth claims contradict other truth claims. To his credit he isn’t so postmodern that he sees no problem in this. This would seem to be then a clash of worldviews issue.
So then on into the book...
