Fiona’s Reviews > The God Delusion > Status Update

"If hell were plausible, it would only have to be moderately unpleasant in order to deter. Given that it is so unlikely to be true, it has to be advertised as very very scary indeed, to balance its implausibility and retain some deterrence value."

"The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism—as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ So did Bertrand Russell: ‘Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.’"

"Religious moralists can be heard debating questions like, ‘When does the developing embryo become a person—a human being?’ Secular moralists are more likely to ask, ‘Never mind whether it is human (what does that even mean for a little cluster of cells?); at what age does any developing embryo, of any species, become capable of suffering?’"

"I’m inclined to suspect (with some evidence, although it may be simplistic to draw conclusions from it) that there are very few atheists in prisons. I am not necessarily claiming that atheism increases morality, although humanism—the ethical system that often goes with atheism—probably does." Disproportionately few or actually few, though, if so many people are religious?

For a guy who keeps comparing things to "cranes" and "skyhooks" he never actually clearly defines the important qualities of either. Obviously a reader can get the gist but you think he'd make doubly sure that the reader is on the same page.

I think one of the issues of this book is that it requires some prior knowledge/assumption on the reader's part. It's fine if the reader isn't stupid/can Google, but does make reading a little awkward and disjointed when Dawkins plows along like the reader must follow even though he admits this book isn't just about preaching to the choir. (example: Popperian)

"More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding."

"Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the [creationists] can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science’s answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative."

"Nevertheless, it is a common error, which we shall meet again, to leap from the premise that the question of God’s existence is in principle unanswerable to the conclusion that his existence and his non-existence are equiprobable."

"The ‘hurt’ and ‘suffering’ consisted, remember, not in any person enduring violence or real pain of any kind: nothing more than a few daubs of printing ink in a newspaper that nobody outside Denmark would ever have heard of but for a deliberate campaign of incitement to mayhem." Surprisingly weak argument because sensationalism actually happens fairly often these days with social media.