Throughout The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argues that not only is religious faith a delusion, but that it is downright horrific, and a danger to the civilized world. At the end of his chapter 8, Dawkins says things like: “Christianity…teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don’t have to make the case for…
Near the end of The God Delusion, in chapter 8, Dawkins makes his case for why religion is so bad, and why he feels morally obligated to be hostile toward it. He begins by addressing an accusation that many people, I being one of them, have made against the New Atheist Movement: “Doesn’t your hostility…
Over the past couple of posts I have covered what Richard Dawkins has said about the Old and New Testaments. The gist of my analysis of Dawkins in this respect was pretty simple: he refuses to read and interpret the content of the Old and New Testaments within their historical and literary contexts. It may…
It is fairly common to people complain about how blood-thirsty the God of the Old Testament seems to be. Or, at the very least, the violence in the Old Testament gives people pause. But when it comes to Jesus and the New Testament, well, who doesn’t love Jesus? Gandhi patterned his life after Jesus, and…
In our trek through Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, we have now come to chapter 7, where he turns his attention specifically to the Bible. Let me say up front that his comments may be convincing to anyone who does not understand what the Bible is. Of course, to those who understand the literary and…
In case you haven’t noticed, I find Richard Dawkins fascinating—not exactly in a positive sense, though. What I mean is that I am genuinely mystified by much of what he says and claims. Not only does he show no real interest in actually understanding what the Bible actually is and what Christianity really teaches, but…
***NOTE: This originally was a short little piece I wrote for the Regent College newspaper back in 1997…it never got published, but it is a piece of writing of which I still am extremely proud. If you’re a Biblical Studies nerd, enjoy… “A” Gospel: The True Source of “Q” I wish to tell of a…
In this post, I’m going to address what Richard Dawkins specifically says about what he calls “religious memes.” If you don’t know what a “meme” is, I encourage you to read my previous post. Dawkins concludes his chapter 5 in The God Delusion by equating religious ideas with the concept of memes. A “meme” is Dawkins’ made-up…
When I first read The God Delusion back in 2011, that was the first time I had ever come across “Meme Theory.” Now, you have probably heard the term “internet meme”: those quirky little snippets on the internet that get hopelessly repeated with minor variations in the message. Well, if you’ve ever wondered, “What the…
Natural Selection, YEC, GG, and ID, and Another Dawkins-Ham Connection Richard Dawkins describes natural selection as a gradual process of adaptations in life, and distinguishes it from both “design” and “chance.” As he states, “natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces…