October 26, 2009
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Lest it be said that I am biased toward atheist authors…
[JD 2455131.21]
Stephen Frederick Uhl’s Coming Out of God’s Closet is really quite awful. I would never have bought it; I received it free from the Center For Inquiry. (In the future I recommend the CFI use better books, like The God Delusion or The End of Faith.)
It starts with bizarre formatting; the opening sections are random vignettes that clearly Dr. Uhl had no idea what else to do with, filled with heavy overuse of bold font: “When I was a little boy, a very little boy, I learned that I would go to heaven and be very happy: if I obeyed my mother and father; if I loved Jesus, the son of a special virgin; if I believed in the one God the Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; if I did not eat meat on Friday; if I attended Mass on Sunday.”
It moves on to jokes inserted at random intervals, including one about a donkey that has nothing to do with religion except it happens to use the words “Amen” and “Hallelujah”. Another involves television preachers, but is ultimately about erectile dysfunction. Hardly any of them are very funny. These jokes are generally near the beginning and end of chapters, but you never really know when one will pop up.
And then of course there is the text itself, which is poorly organized, with neither a chronological nor logical ordering, at the chapter level, at the section level, or sometimes even at the paragraph level. It’s an exciting adventure to try to guess what Uhl will say next, and if it will bear any logical relation to what he said last. Several times Uhl references something he’ll talk about “in the next chapter” and it will have in fact been the previous chapter, or not the next but the one after that.
Most of the points made are either extremely personal to Uhl himself, or remarkably banal. The latter I may be able to forgive, since religious people seem to be especially skilled at ignoring obvious facts that people have been trying to point out for centuries. There really do seem to be people who are convinced by the arguments of Thomas Aquinas, so maybe it’s worthwhile to have yet another author refute them yet another time.
Still, I’d rather have atheist represented by someone with better writing and editing skills… perhaps Uhl should leave this matter to the professionals.
Comments (16)
I’ll still buy it. Just to read it for myself. Hah! Your scathing review backfired!
Lol, wow.
The book’s title is kinda ambigious.
“If I had a magic wand with which to eradicate either religion or rape, I’d choose to eradicate religion.”
- Sam Harris (a doctoral student at Stanford and atheist author of New York Times bestsellers The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation)
“The God Delusion (International bestseller written by atheist Richard Dawkins) makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.”
- Michael Ruse, professor of philosophy at Florida State University
“I find it fascinating that among the brilliant scientists and philosophers at the conference, there was no convincing evidence presented that they know how to deal with the basic irrationality of human life than to insist against all reason and evidence that ought to be raitional and evidence based. It makes me embarrassed to be a scientist and atheist.”
- Scott Atran – atheist and professor of psychology (regarding Sam Harris’ presentation at the Salk Institute)
“The God Delusion” has been absolutely trashed by many reviewers, including prominent atheists like Theodore Dalrymple and Michael Ruse.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html
http://www.evolutionary-philosophy.net/review_god_delusion.html
http://www.bede.org.uk/goddelusion.htm
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html#
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19775#
@ISpeakLife -
1) I agree; both are bad, but religion has done far more damage than rape.
2) Embarrassed why?
3) The basic irrationality of human life? So because much of our lives is irrational, we are supposed to simply sit there and accept that?
@soccerdadforlife -
Responses to each review:
1) Dawkins’ “ridiculous caricatures” are what millions of people explicitly profess to believe; as many as 40% of Americans according to Gallup polls. Sophisticated theologians may have abandoned these idiotic notions, but ordinary people haven’t. Dawkins is talking to the ordinary people.
2) The major objection seems to be to a tiny part of the book about cosmology, which Dawkins admits is not his field. The others are to the claim that Dawkins unfairly caricatures people’s beliefs by attacking personal/prayer/virgin-born types of gods, when in fact that is what nearly everyone in the world believes in and precisely what Dawkins (and Harris, and I) objects to.
3) Actually, this review I agree with. Dawkins is much less meticulous about his arguments for atheism than he is about his arguments in his other books. This was a serious flaw, but it doesn’t change the fact that Dawkins is basically right.
4) Maybe it’s not new. We’ve been saying it for centuries. So why aren’t people listening, dammit!?
5) Again the objection is that Dawkins doesn’t “seriously engage theology”, when in fact neither do the millions of Americans who believe that the Earth is 6000 years old and Jesus was literally born of a virgin. In fact, you’re one of those, aren’t you? How can you in good conscience defend arguments that rest entirely upon saying that people who believe what you yourself believe are an insane fringe minority?
@CelestialTeapot -
Surprisingly, the book contains no homosexual undertones whatsoever.
@pnrj - We are quite sane. You are quite illogical in asserting that an omnipotent being couldn’t cause a virgin to give birth. And we have good reason to believe the age of the earth based on the testimony of a perfect Witness. If you disbelieve a perfect Witness, seems to me that you have issues with reality.
@soccerdadforlife -
I say not that an omnipotent being couldn’t cause a virgin birth—clearly if there is such a thing it could do that—but rather that there is no good reason to think that any omnipotent being exists or that any being has ever caused virgin births.
As for your perfect Witness [sic], you have nothing of the sort. You have a collection of ancient texts that are mutually-inconsistent and full of absurd fairy tales. Even if they are in fact eyewitness accounts (unlikely), they are no more credible than the thousands of eyewitness accounts of alien abductions and alleged “miracles” performed by people like Uri Geller, L. Ron Hubbard, and Jose deLuis deJesus. You have the same sort of evidence as Muslims, Mormons, Hindus, Scientologists, and people of a thousand other religions. And yet you believe your religion and no one else’s—why?
@pnrj -
Actually I retract part of my statement: There is plenty of evidence of virgin births in the form of parthenogenesis in lizards and aphids, and in the form of artificial insemination in many animals including humans. The lack of evidence is for miraculous virgin birth, and for the virgin birth of a particular Roman mystic named Jesus.
Great post! I toyed with reading “Coming Out…” but now I guess I won’t
You would have enjoyed this debate I went to a couple of year’s ago between Michael Shermer and Dinesh D’Souza
http://careygly.xanga.com/631443266/why-people-believe-strange-things—would-you-die-for-your-faith/
carey recommend your post so i thought i’d check it out. interesting thing about God – as an active Catholic, i can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that He exists though i can offer some good arguments – on the other hand, atheists can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that He doesn’t exist though they too can offer some good arguments for their beliefs. so the operative word is belief – no proofs available to either side so we all need to learn to respect one another’s beliefs! peace, Al
@pukemeister -
A lack of certainty does not imply that all views are equally plausible. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, I can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there isn’t a teapot orbiting Mars—but you’d have to be quite insane to believe that there was.
@pnrj -
like i said, it’s called respect regardless of which side of the issue you’re on – to not respect each other’s beliefs is both unchristian and inhumane
I was curious if you ever considered changing the structure of
your site? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
But maybe you could a little more in the way of content
so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for
only having 1 or two images. Maybe you could space it out better?