Justin Scharton's Reviews > The God Delusion

While Dawkins brings up a few legitimate points about some of the horrible things us humans have done in the name of a number of religions, he lost me quickly with the following:

1) his attack on anyone who didn't think like him. He and his wife narrate the audio book version of this book and they switch off berating anyone who isn't an atheist and make fun of them as idiots. Instead of letting their argument stand on its own, he beats you over the head with his arguments and threatens you should you question anything he espouses.

2) Shifting logic - Dawkins is intellectually disingenuous by using one logic to "prove" that God doesn't exist in one argument, then in his next argument abandons that logic because it doesn't work so well for that argument.

3) Passing theories off as fact - Example: Thomas Jefferson was an atheist. While no Jefferson expert, I've studied Jefferson enough to understand that while not a dogmatic, church-attending Christian of the day, he also wasn't an expressed atheist. A nuanced fact like that doesn't work for Dawkins, he prefers to take a couple quotes out of context to spin it to his perspective.

4) Dogmatism - I just can't stand dogmatism in any form, and just as some of Dawkins' "enemies" in the pews on Sunday morning, he is as dogmatic as anyone I've ever read about his particular topic. Dogmatism prevents critical thinking, reason, and acknowledging (yet disagreeing) with your intellectual foe.

I really like to read/listen to points-of-view that vary from my own to help challenge and shape my own opinions and reasoning. But Dawkins' book is the McDonald's of intellectual reasoning and logic, and I am just not into that.