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seclement's review
1.0
This is a terrible book. Written in the style that is much more suited to ranty blog posts and responses to commenters, the entire book belongs on the internet, not in print. I identify as both a feminist and an atheist, but this is the sort of ranty feminist manifesto that makes me wish I was neither. The author is clearly intelligent, but the entire book comes off as petty and pointless. I suspect that the first chapter, in which the author lays out 99 reasons why she's pissed off, is the original blog post. Each of the chapters that follow strike me as responses she has developed in arguments on and offline. I didn't find many pearls of wisdom in this book, and I wouldn't recommend this to either atheists or those who are curious about why atheists feel the way they do. She certainly doesn't speak to me, and there are much more well-reasoned books out there.
rotorguy64's review against another edition
2.0
As a former atheist myself, little of what was written in this book surprised me. I already knew most of these arguments and the mindset behind them, the focus on Reason and Rationality with a capital R, the even bigger focus on the scientific method whether it's applicable or not, and so on. Ironically, while thinking made me an atheist when I was an agnostic before, thinking harder made me an agnostic again with a leaning towards Christianity. I'll come to a few reasons in the course of this review, but as this is about the book and not me, I will mostly be talking about the book.
Why not start at the same place Christina started: The delightful list of 99 things that piss her off. I think that was a terrible way to start off the book. At every fifth point, an objection popped in my head "What has that got to do with religion?" "How is that a matter of religion and not custom?" "Should we really attribute all of this to religion in general and not to particular religions?" Sometimes, Christina anticipated these objections, but often, she then went on to refer me to later parts of the book instead of refuting them on the spot. After reason number 20, she has already made her point and hooked the reader, but then she goes on and on and on about mutilated children, bombings, terror attacks, assassinations of cartoonists, sexual abuse and other crimes.
If there's something I learned from studying criminal law, it's that for a criminal conviction, you need more than just an accused and some horrible act. You need to show how they are related, how it was the accused in particular who committed this act and how he can be held responsible. That's what the doctrine of proximate cause is for, for example. When you want to convince me that communism, or capitalism, or religion, or atheism are the cause of something horrible, I want something to link ideology and act, too. If you give me too many murders and rapes and thefts and too little to attribute them, then I'll feel like you're trying to stir my raw emotions, not any emotions guided by reason. There's a difference between righteous anger and just being fucking pissed, a distinction that she seems to be aware of except in the beginning of the book.
Christina didn't use my terminology, of course, but she did promise in her own words to deliver on the attribution. And she did. Religion, she says, is characterized by the fact that it's not open to what she calls reality checks. As the idea of , she names ideas that aren't religious and that can be disproven when they clash with reality. Communism or the idea of the free market, for example. I'm glad she brought these two up because they help me make my case. They show perfectly just how stuck she is in the empiricist mindset. An empirical method doesn't work properly in the social sciences, however. [b:Human Action|81912|Human Action A Treatise on Economics|Ludwig von Mises|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328775326s/81912.jpg|1747054], [b:Economic Science and the Austrian Method|168856|Economic Science and the Austrian Method|Hans-Hermann Hoppe|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1337386812s/168856.jpg|163059] and [b:The Counter-Revolution of Science|1476342|The Counter-Revolution of Science|Friedrich A. Hayek|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328768270s/1476342.jpg|1467371] all make this case very convincingly. That communism doesn't work is not proven by the historical record, but by a priori reasoning. Without it, any communist could come up and show us his new, totally improved economic system that fixes all the errors of the USSR and Red China, and we couldn't argue against him. It's not because communism hasn't worked in the past that we can say it's a failure, but because we figured out why it didn't work. It didn't fail a reality check as she seems to use that term, it failed an a priori inquiry on whether it could ever work.
With religions, it's often similar. Yes, some claims are testable, like the age of the universe or With prayer, that already becomes doubtful. Many Christians don't equate prayers with writing wish lists to God, but even the ones that do something like that don't think he's an automatism. Some will tell you that God accounts for free will, for example, and that that's why he won't take all the consequences of our bad choices from us. Others will tell you that he cares for you so much that he won't just grant any wish if that would just harm you in the long-term. Both can also be true. That's not a cop out, it's a traditional position that many Christians sincerely hold even before they're faced with any evidence that God doesn't answer all prayers. The way you argue against that is with a priori reasoning, not by setting up a study to measure the efficacy of prayer. With God's existence, it's similar. There's a priori arguments put forth by scholars and philosophers for why he must exist. They will laugh at your face when you point out that you cannot empirically observe him, and rightly so. Engage them on a philosophical level if you want to prove them wrong. When they insist that you're wrong even after you have defeated them, then you can conclude that they're
Not just that the author is oblivious to rationalist epistemics, she's also wrong on the facts, and her interpretations of history are extremely flawed. She claims that Hitler was a Christian, for example, and that the crimes of the Nazis were religiously motivated. It's true that Hitler defended Christianity in some speeches, most notably in 1922. It's also true that he defended both free enterprise and socialism in speeches. Should we conclude from this that he hated and loved capitalism at the same time, or that we was just lying to the public? (Reminder: He was a politician. At the best of times, they lie.) It's better to look at his private conversations, and then we'll see that he was, in fact, not a believer, and was quite hostile to Christianity at times, going so far as to call Christianity the "propotype of bolshevism". That the Nazis didn't kill the jews for religious reasons should go without mention. Their primary reasons always were racialist and biological, religious reasons were at best post hoc rationalizations. Otherwise, why would they have hunted down jews that weren't practicing? Why would they have sterilized jews instead of adopting jewish children, like they did with children from other cultures as part of the Lebensborn Program? It was because they saw the jews as tainted on a biological level. They saw them as pests, on the same level as insects, and that constantly shone through in their rhetoric.
And there's more. That there is no evidence for the historical Jesus, for example, is another of her claims. Yet we have not only the Gospels, we also have accounts from chroniclers that were hostile to Christianity, some of whom even called him a sorcerer. Her narrative of the War of Independence as a popular uprising, or of the French Revolution as a beneficial event count as flawed interpretations to me even if they were only mentioned in passing. She also shows an ignorance of how the Bible was compiled when she counts the instances where hell was invoked, when the original Bible used the words tartarus, gehenna, hades and sheol in its place. Translators lumped all these concepts together and that's why Jesus seems fixated on hell. How can you have a major in religion, as Greta Christina does, and not know that? She also invokes the dichotomy of fatih and reason, when that was a particular invention of the Reformation. Catholic theology doesn't assume a conflict between the two, and many older religions just plain wouldn't have thought this dichotomy up. Socrates tried to prove the existence of the soul with logical reasoning, which shows that to him, the things beyond this world are not beyond inquiry. Then there's some more primitive religions and cultures that had no real concept of rational inquiry. How then could their faith conflict with their reason, when that reason was seriously underdeveloped? It's true that all humans are endowed with reason, but devising a coherent system of logic and a methodology for testing claims is not a trivial task and many culltures never did it. (To say that religion held reason back is even more ridiculous when we keep that in mind, by the way.) I'm also puzzled that she holds religion responsible for so many horrible things but never once stops to consider the case of the USSR. Twenty million people dead as a lower count, and many of them died because they had a religion, yet this doesn't make her think? I don't want to speculate openly on what possible response she would give, I just want to say that I see no possibility of her defeating this argument without at least weakening her overall case.
Another problem with this book is that her standards of evidence are all over the place. She discards the argument from popularity, and rightly so, but before she does that, she claims that if there was a convincing argument for God's existence, it would "spread like wildfire". Because such a popular argument doesn't exst, we can assume that God doesn't exist. See the problem? You cannot hold that good arguments necessarly get popular and then discard popular arguments based on the notion that their popularity doesn't mean they're good. I'm also wondering how she can sincerely hold the position that scriptural interpretation is arbitrary, when we can also interpret ancient poems, stories, chronicles and so on. She also invokes the fact that there's no consensus on religious matters to prove that religions are wrong. Aside from the fact that all monotheistic communities agree that God created the universe and that he's immeasurably good and powerful, and that the judgement of good and bad people in the afterlife has an even longer tradition, this also doesn't prove anything. There's no consensus on lots of topics, and yet no one ever abstracted this standard and declared that everything on which there is no consensus must be non-existant. Clearly, that would be madness.
Now, to the good, of which there isn't a lot, but obviously enough for me not to give this book the worst rating. Some of her arguments are alright, even if she stretches them too far (they're usually spot-on against some Evangelicals), and many of the 99 things that make her freaking mad are terrible. She also seemed like a fairly nice person with some surprisingly good views thrown in here and there. She constantly stresses that she doesn't want to prohibit religion or violently coerce people to give it up, too, and she defends evangelism, at least in theory, because spreading the truth is a good thing and so religious proliferation would be good if religions were true. I can't argue with that logic at all. Then there is her very good view on discourse and argumentation, namely that you cannot change a persons mind within one conversation, you can only plant a seed that may or may not develop. It's also not only about the person you're talking to, it's about the audience of the discussion, too. They should take your arguments to heart and remember you as the reasonable person in the conversation. All very good and immensely valuable insights from her, but sadly, they cannot compensate for all the blunders.
If you're interested in Christian philosophy, not just in stuff that some Christians with no formal education in theology or philosophy say, check out [a:Edward Feser|43145|Edward Feser|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1392394381p2/43145.jpg], [a:Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn|394144|Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1297611194p2/394144.jpg], [a:C.S. Lewis|1069006|C.S. Lewis|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1367519078p2/1069006.jpg] and [a:Ralph McInerny|32123|Ralph McInerny|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1266164923p2/32123.jpg]. There's more, of course, but I'm only just beginning to explore this field. So far, I don't regret it.
Why not start at the same place Christina started: The delightful list of 99 things that piss her off. I think that was a terrible way to start off the book. At every fifth point, an objection popped in my head "What has that got to do with religion?" "How is that a matter of religion and not custom?" "Should we really attribute all of this to religion in general and not to particular religions?" Sometimes, Christina anticipated these objections, but often, she then went on to refer me to later parts of the book instead of refuting them on the spot. After reason number 20, she has already made her point and hooked the reader, but then she goes on and on and on about mutilated children, bombings, terror attacks, assassinations of cartoonists, sexual abuse and other crimes.
If there's something I learned from studying criminal law, it's that for a criminal conviction, you need more than just an accused and some horrible act. You need to show how they are related, how it was the accused in particular who committed this act and how he can be held responsible. That's what the doctrine of proximate cause is for, for example. When you want to convince me that communism, or capitalism, or religion, or atheism are the cause of something horrible, I want something to link ideology and act, too. If you give me too many murders and rapes and thefts and too little to attribute them, then I'll feel like you're trying to stir my raw emotions, not any emotions guided by reason. There's a difference between righteous anger and just being fucking pissed, a distinction that she seems to be aware of except in the beginning of the book.
Christina didn't use my terminology, of course, but she did promise in her own words to deliver on the attribution. And she did. Religion, she says, is characterized by the fact that it's not open to what she calls reality checks. As the idea of , she names ideas that aren't religious and that can be disproven when they clash with reality. Communism or the idea of the free market, for example. I'm glad she brought these two up because they help me make my case. They show perfectly just how stuck she is in the empiricist mindset. An empirical method doesn't work properly in the social sciences, however. [b:Human Action|81912|Human Action A Treatise on Economics|Ludwig von Mises|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328775326s/81912.jpg|1747054], [b:Economic Science and the Austrian Method|168856|Economic Science and the Austrian Method|Hans-Hermann Hoppe|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1337386812s/168856.jpg|163059] and [b:The Counter-Revolution of Science|1476342|The Counter-Revolution of Science|Friedrich A. Hayek|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328768270s/1476342.jpg|1467371] all make this case very convincingly. That communism doesn't work is not proven by the historical record, but by a priori reasoning. Without it, any communist could come up and show us his new, totally improved economic system that fixes all the errors of the USSR and Red China, and we couldn't argue against him. It's not because communism hasn't worked in the past that we can say it's a failure, but because we figured out why it didn't work. It didn't fail a reality check as she seems to use that term, it failed an a priori inquiry on whether it could ever work.
With religions, it's often similar. Yes, some claims are testable, like the age of the universe or With prayer, that already becomes doubtful. Many Christians don't equate prayers with writing wish lists to God, but even the ones that do something like that don't think he's an automatism. Some will tell you that God accounts for free will, for example, and that that's why he won't take all the consequences of our bad choices from us. Others will tell you that he cares for you so much that he won't just grant any wish if that would just harm you in the long-term. Both can also be true. That's not a cop out, it's a traditional position that many Christians sincerely hold even before they're faced with any evidence that God doesn't answer all prayers. The way you argue against that is with a priori reasoning, not by setting up a study to measure the efficacy of prayer. With God's existence, it's similar. There's a priori arguments put forth by scholars and philosophers for why he must exist. They will laugh at your face when you point out that you cannot empirically observe him, and rightly so. Engage them on a philosophical level if you want to prove them wrong. When they insist that you're wrong even after you have defeated them, then you can conclude that they're
Not just that the author is oblivious to rationalist epistemics, she's also wrong on the facts, and her interpretations of history are extremely flawed. She claims that Hitler was a Christian, for example, and that the crimes of the Nazis were religiously motivated. It's true that Hitler defended Christianity in some speeches, most notably in 1922. It's also true that he defended both free enterprise and socialism in speeches. Should we conclude from this that he hated and loved capitalism at the same time, or that we was just lying to the public? (Reminder: He was a politician. At the best of times, they lie.) It's better to look at his private conversations, and then we'll see that he was, in fact, not a believer, and was quite hostile to Christianity at times, going so far as to call Christianity the "propotype of bolshevism". That the Nazis didn't kill the jews for religious reasons should go without mention. Their primary reasons always were racialist and biological, religious reasons were at best post hoc rationalizations. Otherwise, why would they have hunted down jews that weren't practicing? Why would they have sterilized jews instead of adopting jewish children, like they did with children from other cultures as part of the Lebensborn Program? It was because they saw the jews as tainted on a biological level. They saw them as pests, on the same level as insects, and that constantly shone through in their rhetoric.
And there's more. That there is no evidence for the historical Jesus, for example, is another of her claims. Yet we have not only the Gospels, we also have accounts from chroniclers that were hostile to Christianity, some of whom even called him a sorcerer. Her narrative of the War of Independence as a popular uprising, or of the French Revolution as a beneficial event count as flawed interpretations to me even if they were only mentioned in passing. She also shows an ignorance of how the Bible was compiled when she counts the instances where hell was invoked, when the original Bible used the words tartarus, gehenna, hades and sheol in its place. Translators lumped all these concepts together and that's why Jesus seems fixated on hell. How can you have a major in religion, as Greta Christina does, and not know that? She also invokes the dichotomy of fatih and reason, when that was a particular invention of the Reformation. Catholic theology doesn't assume a conflict between the two, and many older religions just plain wouldn't have thought this dichotomy up. Socrates tried to prove the existence of the soul with logical reasoning, which shows that to him, the things beyond this world are not beyond inquiry. Then there's some more primitive religions and cultures that had no real concept of rational inquiry. How then could their faith conflict with their reason, when that reason was seriously underdeveloped? It's true that all humans are endowed with reason, but devising a coherent system of logic and a methodology for testing claims is not a trivial task and many culltures never did it. (To say that religion held reason back is even more ridiculous when we keep that in mind, by the way.) I'm also puzzled that she holds religion responsible for so many horrible things but never once stops to consider the case of the USSR. Twenty million people dead as a lower count, and many of them died because they had a religion, yet this doesn't make her think? I don't want to speculate openly on what possible response she would give, I just want to say that I see no possibility of her defeating this argument without at least weakening her overall case.
Another problem with this book is that her standards of evidence are all over the place. She discards the argument from popularity, and rightly so, but before she does that, she claims that if there was a convincing argument for God's existence, it would "spread like wildfire". Because such a popular argument doesn't exst, we can assume that God doesn't exist. See the problem? You cannot hold that good arguments necessarly get popular and then discard popular arguments based on the notion that their popularity doesn't mean they're good. I'm also wondering how she can sincerely hold the position that scriptural interpretation is arbitrary, when we can also interpret ancient poems, stories, chronicles and so on. She also invokes the fact that there's no consensus on religious matters to prove that religions are wrong. Aside from the fact that all monotheistic communities agree that God created the universe and that he's immeasurably good and powerful, and that the judgement of good and bad people in the afterlife has an even longer tradition, this also doesn't prove anything. There's no consensus on lots of topics, and yet no one ever abstracted this standard and declared that everything on which there is no consensus must be non-existant. Clearly, that would be madness.
Now, to the good, of which there isn't a lot, but obviously enough for me not to give this book the worst rating. Some of her arguments are alright, even if she stretches them too far (they're usually spot-on against some Evangelicals), and many of the 99 things that make her freaking mad are terrible. She also seemed like a fairly nice person with some surprisingly good views thrown in here and there. She constantly stresses that she doesn't want to prohibit religion or violently coerce people to give it up, too, and she defends evangelism, at least in theory, because spreading the truth is a good thing and so religious proliferation would be good if religions were true. I can't argue with that logic at all. Then there is her very good view on discourse and argumentation, namely that you cannot change a persons mind within one conversation, you can only plant a seed that may or may not develop. It's also not only about the person you're talking to, it's about the audience of the discussion, too. They should take your arguments to heart and remember you as the reasonable person in the conversation. All very good and immensely valuable insights from her, but sadly, they cannot compensate for all the blunders.
If you're interested in Christian philosophy, not just in stuff that some Christians with no formal education in theology or philosophy say, check out [a:Edward Feser|43145|Edward Feser|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1392394381p2/43145.jpg], [a:Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn|394144|Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1297611194p2/394144.jpg], [a:C.S. Lewis|1069006|C.S. Lewis|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1367519078p2/1069006.jpg] and [a:Ralph McInerny|32123|Ralph McInerny|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1266164923p2/32123.jpg]. There's more, of course, but I'm only just beginning to explore this field. So far, I don't regret it.
ahsansenan's review against another edition
1.0
Greta Christina's whole philosophy seems to stem from the idea that if organized (or not) religions have radicalized themselves, the only left for atheists to do is to uber-radicalize themselves.
The author's too angry for her own good, methink.
The author's too angry for her own good, methink.
catmar19's review
3.0
I noticed this book while I was browsing for another book, and the title jumped out at me. I decided to give it a go.
It's self-published, and I think it could have used a little more editing. There were a few repetitive phrases, and the tone shifted here and there. It was pretty easy to read, and I may think this because I already know this about the author, but it reads like a series of blog entries. I also didn't like how the target audience seemed to shift back and forth from believers to atheists. It's annoying to ranted at for something you haven't done.
It was interesting, thought provoking. The arguments were well thought-out and specific. I don't know if I agree with all of it, but there were parts that I had definitely thought before. And I think this is a book that people should read, especially people considering atheism.
It didn't change me. I'm not going to do anything that I'm not doing already, but it did give me some things to think about.
It's self-published, and I think it could have used a little more editing. There were a few repetitive phrases, and the tone shifted here and there. It was pretty easy to read, and I may think this because I already know this about the author, but it reads like a series of blog entries. I also didn't like how the target audience seemed to shift back and forth from believers to atheists. It's annoying to ranted at for something you haven't done.
It was interesting, thought provoking. The arguments were well thought-out and specific. I don't know if I agree with all of it, but there were parts that I had definitely thought before. And I think this is a book that people should read, especially people considering atheism.
It didn't change me. I'm not going to do anything that I'm not doing already, but it did give me some things to think about.
codalion's review
3.0
This is a short book for, uh... can I say 'preaching to the choir' here? It's definitely what it is. I just realized I read this sometime last year and never logged it. Anyway, I can't imagine it changing any minds: but then again, I don't think minds can be changed forcibly (except by the growing, inexorable pressure of a social group - and then, alas, minds can be changed to anything) so I don't care that much. I mean, there are enough Christians who think Lewis's Mere Christianity serves some purpose aside from making Christians feel reasonable about points of pure faith. Pretty sure this book is just a bullet-pointed venting session. That being said, I'm fickle, and I remember liking it more than I thought I would.
I'm going to jot down an imaginary FAQ with a strawman interlocutor just for the hell of it:
Q: But aren't obnoxious atheists so annoying? And isn't their movement super problematic for [list of clear observable reasons in aggregate]?
A: Sure and yes.
Q: This book primarily talks about Christianity though!
A: It's not exactly a deep or insightful text about religion or religion-and-politics. It's a glorified blog rant. That being said, the author seems to be from a Christian-majority country (as am I), so I think it would be weird and in fact more inappropriate for it to try to be artificially evenhanded - there's no threat of any other kind of theocratic rule in America. All other religions are marginalized and vilified here.
Q: If you're not part of the 'movement' and you agree it's annoying, don't you think it's important to be nice and not implicitly call other people's beliefs untrue?
A: Provided you are not busting into their house like the Kool-Aid man, or in a position of authority or responsibility over them: no.
Anyway, in all seriousness... from my personal perspective the 'new atheist' movement has been useless, grating, annoying, and mostly absorbed the snide prejudices of the water surrounding in a typical way. That being said, I've been irreligious my whole life and have never needed the value of an irreligious community to give me emotional or social 'permission' to question what I'd previously believed: I never previously believed. I've definitely known multiple people for whom that wasn't true, who wouln't have felt comfortable breaking from their family's values (not everyone can relish breaking from their family's values as much as I do! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) without the work and outspoken anger of other people. So in this sense, I do think there's a crucial social place for a noisy antireligious movement as long as parents are given the authority to be tyrants to their kids, and as long as ostracization from traditionalist communities is a way to ruin people. So this will be going for a while, I imagine.
I just wish the available movement wasn't so, uh...
Anyway, authority is illegitimate. No gods, no masters. And I, separately, would not pay $7.99 for this book. (Seriously, what the hell. Put it on KU or something, author.)
I'm going to jot down an imaginary FAQ with a strawman interlocutor just for the hell of it:
Q: But aren't obnoxious atheists so annoying? And isn't their movement super problematic for [list of clear observable reasons in aggregate]?
A: Sure and yes.
Q: This book primarily talks about Christianity though!
A: It's not exactly a deep or insightful text about religion or religion-and-politics. It's a glorified blog rant. That being said, the author seems to be from a Christian-majority country (as am I), so I think it would be weird and in fact more inappropriate for it to try to be artificially evenhanded - there's no threat of any other kind of theocratic rule in America. All other religions are marginalized and vilified here.
Q: If you're not part of the 'movement' and you agree it's annoying, don't you think it's important to be nice and not implicitly call other people's beliefs untrue?
A: Provided you are not busting into their house like the Kool-Aid man, or in a position of authority or responsibility over them: no.
Anyway, in all seriousness... from my personal perspective the 'new atheist' movement has been useless, grating, annoying, and mostly absorbed the snide prejudices of the water surrounding in a typical way. That being said, I've been irreligious my whole life and have never needed the value of an irreligious community to give me emotional or social 'permission' to question what I'd previously believed: I never previously believed. I've definitely known multiple people for whom that wasn't true, who wouln't have felt comfortable breaking from their family's values (not everyone can relish breaking from their family's values as much as I do! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) without the work and outspoken anger of other people. So in this sense, I do think there's a crucial social place for a noisy antireligious movement as long as parents are given the authority to be tyrants to their kids, and as long as ostracization from traditionalist communities is a way to ruin people. So this will be going for a while, I imagine.
I just wish the available movement wasn't so, uh...
Anyway, authority is illegitimate. No gods, no masters. And I, separately, would not pay $7.99 for this book. (Seriously, what the hell. Put it on KU or something, author.)
joergr's review
5.0
An excellent resource. Short for a book, but a long consistent and yet concise argument for why atheists are angry, why that is good, and why that means every kind of religion, spirituality etc. And then, a good call to do something in the last chapters. Greta Christina is one of the great writers in this arm of the galaxy.
jakewalters's review
5.0
I highly recommend this book to those that are questioning their beliefs. The author does a great job in showing why us godless heathens are so angry (even if you're not angry she specifically breaks down why she's angry and notes she doesn't hate religion but hates what religion causes) about religion. I will be pointing people to this book when they ask me why I'm angry about religion. This would be a great book for the faithful as well to hopefully understand atheists and agnostics a bit better.