The GOD Delusion by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page A

another of today's three 'great'
monotheistic religions (four if you count Mormonism), all of which
trace themselves back to the mythological patriarch Abraham, and it
will be convenient to keep this family of traditions in mind throughout
the rest of the book.
    This
is as good a moment as any to forestall an inevitable retort to the
book, one that would otherwise - as sure as night follows day - turn up
in a review: 'The God that Dawkins doesn't believe in is a God that I
don't believe in either. I don't believe in an old man in the sky with
a long white beard.' That old man is an irrelevant distraction and his
beard is as tedious as it is long. Indeed, the distraction is worse
than irrelevant. Its very silliness is calculated to distract attention
from the fact that what the speaker really believes is not a whole lot
less silly. I know you don't believe in an old bearded man sitting on a
cloud, so let's not waste any more time on that. I am not attacking any
particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods,
anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have
been or will be invented.

MONOTHEISM
    The
great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism.
From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three
anti-human religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -God is
the Omnipotent Father - hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in
those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
    — GORE VIDAL

    The
oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the
other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely
unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the
smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and
with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman
occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as
a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive
one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world.
Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the
uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its
exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or
Qur'an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the
faith. Christianity, too, was spread by the sword, wielded first by
Roman hands after the Emperor Constantine raised it from eccentric cult
to official religion, then by the Crusaders, and later by the conquistadores and other European invaders and colonists, with missionary
accompaniment. For most of my purposes, all three Abrahamic religions
can be treated as indistinguishable. Unless otherwise stated, I shall
have Christianity mostly in mind, but only because it is the version
with which I happen to be most familiar. For my purposes the
differences matter less than the similarities. And I shall not be
concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism.
Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as
religions
at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life.
    The
simple definition of the God Hypothesis with which I began has to be
substantially fleshed out if it is to accommodate the Abrahamic God. He
not only created the universe; he is a personal God
dwelling within it, or perhaps outside it (whatever that might mean),
possessing the unpleasantly human qualities to which I have alluded.
    Personal
qualities, whether pleasant or unpleasant, form no part of the deist
god of Voltaire and Thomas Paine. Compared with the Old Testament's
psychotic delinquent, the deist God of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment is an altogether grander being: worthy of his cosmic
creation, loftily unconcerned with human affairs, sublimely aloof from
our private thoughts and hopes, caring nothing for our messy sins or
mumbled contritions.