I am not typically in the habit of writing reviews for books, but in this case, I feel obligated to spare any potential reader the evening or week (depending on time available and reading speed) that might be wasted in reading this book.



Before beginning my review, I would like to note that I do not define myself as an atheist, theist, or agnostic because of the terrible connotations with which they are often associated. In fact, I think labels of this sort lead to unnecessary disputes and hasty

I am not typically in the habit of writing reviews for books, but in this case, I feel obligated to spare any potential reader the evening or week (depending on time available and reading speed) that might be wasted in reading this book.



Before beginning my review, I would like to note that I do not define myself as an atheist, theist, or agnostic because of the terrible connotations with which they are often associated. In fact, I think labels of this sort lead to unnecessary disputes and hasty condemnations of character. If I were to begrudgingly accept a title of any kind, it would be that of an empirical skeptic.



First of all, if you are looking for any arguments for or against the existence of god, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for even the most elementary of philosophical arguments or scientific disputes regarding the basis of theistic or atheistic postulations, this is not the book for you. In fact, the author says so himself in the introduction. For anyone interested in the nature of theories surrounding the question of god, this book is far from helpful and, indeed, it never claims to be.



(On another note, If you are looking for a comprehensive outline of philosophical arguments on the matter, I would recommend the following books:

1. Critique of Religion and Philosophy by Walter Kaufmann

2. The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against the Existence of God by John Leslie Mackie

If you want a serious look at all of the arguments for and against god, these books are as in-depth and far-reaching as they get.)



The only thing I can honestly say this book makes any serious attempt to do is to show that the new atheist movement is extreme and the leaders of the movement: Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, etc. are not fit for the task.



Outside of this, the book is nothing more than one odd amalgamation of hand-picked statistics and historical references that serve to bolster the complex melange of personal attacks and random references to the author's own political and social views.



Although the truth-value of statements are not invalidated by the character of those who wrote them, it may prove useful to do a little bit of research on the author (Vox Day) before reading this book, if only to gain an idea of where he is coming from. Because I do not want to be hypocritical in the way that the author was by using personal attacks as substitute (or as supplement, at the very least) to scholarly critique, I can only encourage you to investigate some of his views for yourselves; you may find his opinions on race, gender, etc. a bit curious.



Rather than go any further with my own observations, I have provided a list of direct quotes with page numbers that outline a few of the author's "Intellectual Arguments" in *The Irrational Atheist.*



Enjoy!



(Page Numbers Correspond to Word Document Version)



1. "Richard Dawkins is wrong. Daniel C. Dennett is wrong. Christopher Hitchens is drunk, and he’s wrong. Michel Onfray is French, and he’s wrong. Sam Harris is so superlatively wrong that it will require the development of esoteric mathematics operating simultaneously in multiple dimensions to fully comprehend the orders of magnitude of his wrongness." - Page 10



2. "There’s mediocre prose, there’s bad prose, and then there’s Sam Harris waxing creative. How he didn’t win a Bulwer-Lytton award for that ghastly first page of The End of Faith, I’ll never know. When he’s not being self-consciously literate, his writing is all right, but light a candle to St. Darwin and pray that he never decides to inflict a novel on humanity." - Page 19



3. "Agnostic: “I don’t believe there is a God. Because I haven’t seen the evidence.”

Atheist: “There is no God. Because I’m an asshole.”" - Page 21



4. "High Church atheism may be little more than a mental disorder taking the form of a literal autism." - Page 21



5. "It’s not difficult to falsify Christianity, however. Ergo, Christianity is science." - Page 35



6. "The supposed incompatibility between religion and science can’t be all that great if it is necessary to threaten the Islamic Republic with air strikes and invasion in order to prevent its scientists from performing research in unapproved areas." - Page 45



7. "I am a global warming skeptic myself. Greenland is still colder now than it was when Norse settlers were raising crops there in the eleventh century. So I don’t see why a return to those temperatures should present a problem. Of course, when you grew up waiting for the school bus in 40 below zero wind chills, global warming just doesn’t sound all that ominous." - Page 50



8. One could certainly argue that the threat to humanity from science is not really all that dire, but then it would be necessary to admit that religious faith poses no threat to humanity either, thus demonstrating Harris’s thesis to be entirely bankrupt. - Page 52



9. "The end of science is a much more practical goal for the benefit of humanity than the end of faith." - Page 58



10. "This poses a real danger to the credibility of science, which is particularly ill-timed in light of the very real danger that science presently poses to humanity. After all, it would be far easier to eliminate a few hundred thousand scientists, even a few million scientists, than 4.85 billion religious adherents." - Page 64



11. "History demonstrates that the ambitious atheist who seeks political power is significantly more likely to reject the moral proscription on things such as slaughtering large numbers of people who stand in the way of establishing a godless utopia.



The peg-legged crack whore, on the other hand, only wants to shift agricultural subsidies from cereal crops to coca plants and poppies and install disco balls in the White House. This is why the philosopher John Locke reached the conclusion that atheists could be tolerated in civil society, so long as they were not permitted to hold positions of political authority." - Page 67



12. "Hitchens, meanwhile, is almost completely indifferent to getting either the science or the theology straight. (He’s just a journalist after all; he’s not expected to.)" - Page 69



13. "The undeniable fact is that the absurdity most often believed by those who have committed Man’s greatest atrocities is that there is no God." - Page 80



14. "History clearly demonstrates that religious faith is not a tool in the hands of those who practice the arts of war." - Page 95



15. "Lennon was a talented musician, but he was also the English equivalent of the kid who has to take the GED instead of the SAT. And then fails it." - Page 98



16. "Religious war is actually less lethal to Americans than their dogs, as they annually suffer 15.7 fatalities due to dog bites." - Page 101



17. "The historical evidence is conclusive. Religious faith very seldom causes war, either implicitly or explicitly. Therefore, God is not the problem." - Page 110



18. "Sam Harris is an ignorant, incompetent, and intellectually dishonest individual who attacks religious faith because it stands in the way of his dream of the ultimate destruction of America." - Page 113



19. "It’s worth noting that Harris has probably caused greater human unhappiness with his books than the serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, ever did with his exotic diet of human flesh, so by his own reckoning, Harris is less moral than Dahmer." - Page 117



20. "At Richard Dawkins’s core is a band geek who is unable to accept the reality that marching tubas and embroidered uniforms will never impress the girls. For all its passionate and detailed explanations of water droplets and entirely new variants of suns, Unweaving the Rainbow ultimately amounts to little more than an unconvincing and repetitive refrain of “This one time, at band camp . . .” - Page 138

