[tags]Dawkins, God, great[/tags]This seems to be a very popular question to debate at present - with the recent release of books from the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens. However, the question I want to ask is why is it that we humans can only feel good when we are attacking something or someone else?

Both Dawkins and Hitchens fall into this trap - for such educated and erudite men they launch into their personal attacks on Christianity with the majority of their attacks being based on historical happenings. Certainly no rational person denies events such as the Holocaust or the crusades but to attribute these events ordered by the rulers of the day , because they were doing this in the name of God, to why one shouldn’t believe in a God or God is just their own version of fanaticism similar to Hitler or King Richard.

I confess I haven’t read Hitchens book - God is Not Great - but I have read Dawkins’s book - The God Delusion. In it Dawkins states that any right thinking Christian will by the end of the book come out an atheist (should the a be capitalised?). Does it not appear strange to you that Dawkins starts off his book by stating that he’s not having a go at any one religion but that he will concentrate on the main religions of our day and then launches into a single minded diatribe against just one religion, Christianity. It would seem that sometime in his personal history a Christian has offended Dawkins for whatever reason and he has made it his single minded job to try and destroy Christianity. He tries to soften his blows by occasionally referring to ‘higher beings’ but it is not long before his arguments return to his favoured topic.

I tried to read the book with an open mind - I was and remain prepared to have any and all of my beliefs challenged but only by those who can do so rationally without virtual spitting and can do so with reference to modern times. Surely no right thinking person attributes the crusades to God? The crusades were ordered by the kings of the day who called upon the name of God to help their side. It was an excuse to galvanise the common people and should never be seen as the reason.

How many times or individuals thank God for helping them win but in reality they probably have little or no belief in a God or Gods? Equally, how many opposing sides call on God to help them win with one side ending up the loser - does this God only support certain teams like we do? Aaron Neville’s song, Is God on Our Side says it all in the final lines when he realises God is on everyone’s side.

Again, using historical events as rationale for attacking a faith is just plain mis-guided at best and downright hypocritical at worst. His other avenue of attack is to instantly assume that all religious people are fundamentalists. Yes there are fanatics, but then these will also appear in any walk of life. Just because a King of England was a fanatical tyrant who believed in God instantly marks every Christian ever born a fanatic in Dawkins eyes. The fact that he continually draws on things that happened decades and in most cases centuries ago seem to pass him by. Every good historian knows that when you research any part of history you also need to consider the times that these events took place in. What was the culture, what were the beliefs, what did people do, and so on. Dawkins ignores all this and uses his polished art of ‘preaching’ with bigger words than most of us know or even understand to baffle and befuddle. Well not that boy.

He also uses anecdotal stories such as he once watched a lecture where a learned professor admitted he’d been wrong for the past 15yrs as evidence that we can all be wrong. Well duh - thanks for the highlights Richard but even I, a non university attending geek had worked that one out but this doesn’t make his assertions any more truthful than that of a Christian - sort ‘theist’ as he likes to call them. For a man who is proclaimed as one of the world’s 3 greatest thinkers of our time - well who voted him there because I don’t recall doing so - his ad-hominem attacks sickened me and caused me to want to find ways to disagree with him. Still I held out hope - dare I say faith? - that he might yet return to reason and give me solid proof (another of his favoured topics of attack) that God doesn’t exist. Sadly he didn’t- if anything, I believe he gave theists the world over more than ample evidence for the opposite - but that’s just my opinion :)

I’ll finish with a quote from Deepak Chopra:Bits in [ ] brackets are my additions

He [Dawkins] goes so far as to tar anyone who believes in God with the same brush as extreme religious fanatics. Sadly, the media often follow his lead, erasing the truth, which is that many scientists are religious and many of the greatest scientists (including Newton and Einstein) probed deep into the existence of God. Not to mention the obvious fact that you don’t have to go to church, or even belong to a religion, to find God plausible.