I finally procured
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It's supposed to be my reading material for my trip to San Francisco next week but I couldn't resist starting it tonight. I could eat this book! Dr. Dawkins is a highly respected evolutionist, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has written several successful books, and is an outspoken (i.e. very controversial) atheist.
He and author Sam Harris (who is also an atheist and a PhD candidate in neuroscience) pretty much say everything (and far more) that I've been thinking all along about the improbability, irrationality, and superfluousness of belief systems that insist on an all powerful, omnipresent, and meddling god; the stupidity of dogma; the idea that the universe is only 6000 years old; that Christ will return in 50 years and rapture his believers who in turn will witness the destruction of the world as we know it; that you will be rewarded with 72 virgins in heaven if you fly your hijacked plane into a skyscraper at 400 miles per hour and take over 3000 people with you; that a zygote in a petri dish has far more of a right to exist than an eight year old girl suffering from a debilitating spinal cord disease and for whom stem cell research would otherwise hold incredible medical possibilities.
Oh, and I loved that Dr. Dawkins used Bertrand Russell's brilliant teapot analogy as a powerful argument against the existence of god.
