The Mythdiver's Take on Dawkin's God Delusion

A BRIEF NOTE ON DAWKINS' GOD DELUSION

%%%

TODAY'S QUOTE:

"I can look at doctrinaire traditions only with a historical and psychological perspective; they have no other significance for me."

-- Albert Einstein

%%%

Wednesday
July 11, 2007

Dear Jaromir,

When I ran into Magda at the Leawood Library yesterday evening, I asked her to persuade you to e-mail me a few words about the book she tells me you're currently reading on the history of Kansas. But then I decided to send you this direct personal invitation to that effect. If you'd have even a few minutes to share your unprocessed impressions of what you've read so far, I'd enjoy hearing whatever you have to say.

I'm nearly all the way through THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins. I'm going to infer here that you've already had a chance to read what I said about it in my open letter to my cousin Jay in Boston earlier this week. To that, I'd just like to add this:

As much as I'd like to recommend THE GOD DELUSION to everyone as the most definitive analysis of organized religion to date, I found it lacking in three areas, one of which stands out in my mind enough to warrant a word or two here. This particular shortcoming centers around Richard Dawkins' conclusion (and I'm paraphrasing here, of course) that RELIGION SERVES NO USEFUL EVOLUTIONARY PURPOSE. I couldn't disagree more.

In my opinion, this glaring flaw in Dawkins' analysis springs from his unfortunate emphasis on the "belief" component of organized religion acting as a function of INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY. Perhaps the reason I'm so attuned to this misdirected analysis is that, until relatively recently, I found myself distracted from the scent of our authentic quarry by the very same red herring, i.e. the red herring notion of institutional religion springing from a community of individual "beliefs" regarding God -- i.e. "the God delusion." My own current view is that all available historical evidence urges the alert observer to analyze institutional religion as A MANIFESTATION OF GROUP PSYCHOLOGY (or more accurately, as an anthropological, economic and political phenomenon).

Dawkins' would have been wise to borrow a page from the numerous writers of the 18th century Enlightenment who considered all organized religions to have been the invention of various PRIEST CASTES who colluded to devise all manner of ingenious means for robbing, controlling, enslaving, exploiting, etc. the rest of the poor schnooks in their tribe with whatever confabulations proved most expeditious toward that end. Another way of saying this would be to simply say that INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION IS A BUSINESS SCHEME AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN. My favorite paradigm of how the money, power and resources got redistributed as a result of this GOD FRAUD may be found in the vast culture and civilization which evolved around THE EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD. Instead of saying "Give me your lunch money or I will beat you up," that priesthood said "Give me your lunch money or I won't rescue you and your loved ones from spending eternity in misery." (Sound familiar?)


History teaches that ORGANIZED RELIGION HAS SERVED A NEGATIVELY USEFUL EVOLUTIONARY PURPOSE by seeing to it that (as Benjamin Disraeli put it) "the wrong people have all the money." Which is just another way of saying that all the wrong people have been selected for survival, procreation, and the otherwise unearned privilege of spreading their seeds, eggs and slanders into the next generation and the next.

Am I Making Any Sense???

Galen