It's 4 in the morning, and I've finally finished reading Daniel Dennett's Breaking The Spell. I found some connections between it and the final Harry Potter book, but not because they both mention "spells." Like Harry Potter 7, Breaking The Spell rambled on for 300 pages before something interesting happened. Sadly for Dennett, his book is only 341 pages long, unlike the 600-ish page Harry Potter behemoth.
The idea behind Breaking The Spell was to carefully entice Christian readers to warm up to the idea of questioning their own religious views by looking at them from global, social, and evolutionary perspectives. The "warming up" part of the book, though, was wordy and danced around the issue far too much. I like arguments to be firm, confident, and unapologetic. Dennett's arguments, unlike similar ones from Dawkins and Harris, possess none of these characteristics.
One of the parts of the book that grabbed my attention was when Dennett discussed the duty of religious moderates to keep the fundamentalist members of their religions in check. It turned out that Dennett was agreeing with and quoting Sam Harris, who made the point in The End of Faith.
I am being a little unfair. I did like Dennett's argument that there should be a class in public and homeschooling curricula that discusses the cultures, beliefs, and traditions associated with all religions without preaching any of them. The idea is that if a child is shown that there are thousands of religions that all claim to be right and are all on equal footing, then logically none of them have any real legitimacy, even the one that their parents are trying to force feed them.
Overall, I was not impressed with Breaking The Spell, and I wouldn't recommend buying it. If you want to hear Dennett's arguments, in full, without the wordy Christian-coaxing, there are plenty of videos on Google Video and YouTube of him lecturing about his argments in Breaking The Spell and another of his books, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. I highly recommend watching the videos.
One name that popped up in Breaking The Spell a few times was Marjoe. Marjoe is a 1970s documentary about, as far as I can tell, a "fake" evangelical preacher who tries to see how many followers he can get even though he doesn't believe any of the religious garbage that he is preaching. It is on Google Video (Sergey Brin and Larry Page are my gods), so I'll watch it and blog about it next.
I'm not sure what I'll read next. My choices are Sam Harris's Letter To A Christian Nation, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, or Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince. I haven't looked at page count yet, but I'll probably end up reading the shortest one first.
Stay tuned!
[Totally random Dennett video to get you started]
Friday, August 8, 2008
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3 comments:
Thanks for that review...sounds like I'll pass on it too.
I remeber Marjo when he first started out (I am OLD). Acutally, he was a child preacher, named "Marjoe" by his folks as a combination of "Mary and Joseph". They were religious freaks.
He was a child prodigy evangelical, and initially was really into it as you'd imagine being brought up by fundies. But he finally came to his senses, and pretty much admitted his whole evangelical routine was bullcrap.
I din't realize he was still around and kicking.
Good review, but I'll pass too lol. I have a hard-time reading some of the pro-atheist books as they are pretty much preaching to the choir and aimed at Christian audiences anyways.
You should write a post on why you're an Atheist. I think it would garner a lot of attention.
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