Recently growing out God...

Normally this blog is purely in German, but since there is the slightest chance, that the author of the book, which I will talk about, could read it, I dug out my best English – or at least what I consider it to be. To be honest, I am a fan of Richard Dawkins, which might rely on the fact (since I buy his books written in English), that English is not my native language and I grossly overestimate the things he writes – or he could be just as brilliant as I think he is. You should find it out yourself. To travel a bit back in time (as he also does on various occasions in his books), I started to read his books more than 10 years ago. Besides, you might have guessed it; I started with “The selfish Gene”.

Until that reading, I thought I got a mere good understanding of what evolution is, but after reading it, it felt like an insight, as if I had known almost nothing before. In this context, I also bought his book “The God Delusion”, which fitted perfectly in my first launch of this blog for religious criticism. I appreciated his clear and direct speech on the various flaws and abominations in the religious scripture, the ambiguous morality and strange ethic values. I also got my (paperback – I was a little embarrassed then) signed, when I met him personally as he received the “Deschner Prize” in Frankfurt in 2007.

Then I paused… a couple of years. Then I revoked my Twitter account some weeks ago (created 2009) and saw an advertisement of the book I am going to talk about now – “Outgrowing God – A Beginner’s Guide”.

Contrary to “God Delusion”, “Outgrowing” is a meek book. Dawkins' reasoning is not less an untangling the religious Gordian knots in the first part of the book as he did previously in his speeches or the “Delusion”, but from my perspective, he tries to be less “offending” (he never offends, but people in their religious bubble see it like that). I think this is a clever strategy - to keep people reading, who might have stopped after a few pages on the “God Delusion”. At the end of the first part, it is very well explained, where the religious beliefs originate from and why they are what they are - (more than likely) fairy tales.

In the second section of the book – you might have guessed it – Dawkins' focus is on where we come from and why is there something on earth at all, further, why some of the species are capable in believing in deities. Since Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, at least I had the impression of seeing the sparkle in his eyes talking about his favourite topic. Again, even after the “Selfish Gene”, I had some new insights from it. The stories are always interesting and catchy and I like this approach of taking one or two more bends in the story, whilst providing some useful information, before making his point. He has a good feeling of how many facts can be given to the reader, even though the facts in the second part are more extensive. He also draws attraction to superstitious believes (aka religion) could survive so long and how it made some sense for our ancestors to hold on to it. He implies the obvious, that if we stop selling our children stupid junk from ancient books as the truth, we have a chance to get over it - he states this not that frankly.

Who should read this book? For a 99% atheist like me, having read the “Crime History of Christianity” by Deschner – all 10 volumes -, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and I also dug into the financial part of the game, wonderfully (and meticulously) analysed by Carsten Frerk, the book provides obviously not a huge lump of information in terms of religious criticism for me. The second (and more biological) part was more fun to read, because Dawkins surprised me with more ease and more often on the evolutionary facts. So I read it mainly to write this recension and to read a Richard Dawkins book – I love the way he thinks and writes, but I might have mentioned that already.

However, who should read this book really? I think it is a wonderful entry to critical thinking and one should read this book as soon as one's English is good enough to understand it. If you are keen and curious enough to find things out, want to be critical, and want to have questions answered – I would say roughly at the beginning of the teenage years. It is also a book for all those agnostics (as I was for a long time), who like to get an entry and a scientific answer for all this superstition around. And last but not least it might be a book also for religious people, not for the fundamental ones, but for those who try to look outside their box and try to understand what moves other people, especially people who cherish reasoning and science more than false believes (and why they do so).

I provide 8 of 8 possible points for this book.

Another personal annotation to end with. I cannot recall really, when Richard Dawkins said that, but it is like carved in my memory like stone, and one parts rest on my ethic fundamentals. I’ll just say it in my words… If we look at the time beam of life on earth, it started more than 3 Billion years ago, and from there on, by replication, our ancestors handed over the torch of life from generation to generation. Each generation threatened by the risks of life, the pressure of evolution – a very, very unlikely chance that you and I are on this earth at all. So being here, writing this blog (and you reading it so far – thank you by the way), is even more unlikely in terms of statistics, than winning the most unlikely lottery on earth. Trillions of things could have happened to kill one of your ancestors (or mine) and trillions of living creatures died (or died out) and cannot share the same time as we do. So we are the lucky ones, we are the ones existing on this planet - albeit for a short time. Even more, we are conscious of being alive and being here, where we are. Considering our good fortune, and that every human on this planet is another winner of this lottery of life, rather let us rejoice and embrace each other, than try to harm or kill each other in the name of some made up and man-made deities.