Book review – The God Delusion

Dawkins claims that his target audience for this book is the religious and and the agnostic. His goal for this audience is to make them realize that they have the option of rejecting religion. Unfortunately, I think it’s highly unlikely that anybody who is actually religious would make it more than a few chapters into this book.

Dawkins lays out great arguments for why he refuses to walk on eggshells around religious belief, for why faith shouldn’t be the only thing we exempt from the free discussion and disagreement we insist upon in every other area of our lives. However, our cultural conventions are such that we ARE used to people tiptoeing around belief, and if you’re trying specifically to get religious people to listen to your arguments for why atheism makes sense, it might not be the best time to treat their beliefs with scorn.

While I’m not Dawkins’ target audience, I found this book quiet valuable. As a prominent atheist, Dawkins has had exposure to every possible argument for God’s existence, and he is able to lay each of them out in turn and explain why he thinks they don’t work. Having thought hard about religion all my life, there was little that I hadn’t considered before reading the book, but having everything laid out in an organized, point-by-point fashion was certainly nothing I had seen before.

I found the book deteriorated a bit into random complaining at the end. Despite that, I think it’s well worth reading for anybody who can stomach Dawkins’ highly irreverent attitude about belief. Even those who can’t make it through the entire thing might want to read the section about WHY we shouldn’t have to treat faith so specially. The argument against holding faith in a place of respect is at least as important an idae to come from this book as the actual arguments for why it doesn’t make sense for God to exist.

 

Score one for the Atheists

While I was in Cleveland for the holidays, I spent a bit of time on a lazy vacation afternoon writing up a review of “The Golden Compass”. Unfortunately, my dad’s network didn’t seem to like me doing anything big over the wireless, and one of the big things it rejected turned out to be saving my review. So it was lost. Oh, the familiar frustration of spending time on something only to have it disappear into the electronic ether.

But there is one advantage to having lost my typing, and that is that on the plane ride home from Cleveland, I watched another movie that I had wanted to see for a long time, which was the first “The Chronicles of Narnia” movie – “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”.

Having been a kid in the 70s and 80s, seeing “Lion” (we’re going to need abbreviations for this post) was of course not optional. Seeing “Compass” was. My opinions may certainly be biased by expectation.

With that caveat, I think that I can definitely say to the Christian movie separatists: “OUR elaborate over-the-top fantasy animation movie beat the pants off of YOUR elaborate over-the-top fantasy animation movie.” Go atheists!

I doubt I would be getting a competitive thrill like this out of this situation at all if it hadn’t been for the uproar around Compass having been made by an Atheist with Atheist messaging. Now, after having seen Lion, I have to seriously say “Give me a break!”

Because of the press, I sat through Compass actively looking for evidence of principles anti-God or anti-belief-in-God or theicidal or anything. The closest Compass came was being anti-religious-state, anti-authoritarian-government, and anti-thought-control. And if you’ve ever read any fantasy, most of them out could be exhibit similar principles. But anti-God? Anti-religion? It’s a fantasy! It’s full of magic, top to bottom. Maybe it’s my atheist roots showing, thinking of magic as being similar to religion, but to me the movie clearly advocates for faith, strong principles, magic, and the potential of the small to triumph with the help of the magically powerful. And that kind of seems a lot like religion to me.

Meanwhile, I watched Lion NOT looking for Christianity. I remember somebody telling me when I was a kid that the books were Christian, and I could see it when they pointed it out, but it was never a main theme in the books for me. So I had basically already dismissed the idea that this was a prominent theme by the time I saw the movie. But blech! Somebody did not teach the makers of Lion about subtlety. I felt like I was in Sunday School. Or really I felt more like I was at a mid-week uplifting social church gathering pretending not to be Christian but so obviously being very Christian. And Lion was made BEFORE Compass, not like some kind of Christian backlash or something. The people who liked Lion were complaining about strong messaging in Compass! Ridiculous.

Anyway, now that I’ve got that out of the system, the main point that I wanted to make was how oh so much better “The Golden Compass” was as a movie than “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” was as a movie. I thought that the movie was truly marvelous. Why?

It drew me in. In order to draw me in, a fantasy has to have, for starters, a reasonably good plot, good script, and good acting. After that, I think the real key to sweeping me away is to NOT have various things I find annoying or distracting. The things it should not have include:

• obvious plot holes
• repetitive plot tricks (e.g. Gandolf in Lord of the Rings repeatedly saying “It’s the only way” to make it clear to the audience what everybody is supposed to do. Ok, so I’m sure thousands of movies are guilty of this, but somehow it stood out for me most clearly in that movie)
• characters that are just plain annoying to have around while I’m trying to watch a movie (hello, Jar Jar Binks)

I will grant that I am a very challenging movie-watcher to not annoy to distraction. But some movies do manage to achieve this.So, in Compass, all of these key ingredients were present and absent for me in the right quantities. And that is when the animation was able to come in and completely take the movie over the edge into “I loved the movie” land. The animation was killer.

Anybody who has read Pullman’s book The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials knows the concept of daemons, a sort of soul or alter-ego that lives outside of the inhabitants in this alternate world. The makers of the Compass must have realized how critical it was to get the daemons right. And they did a fantastic job. They didn’t just not screw up the daemons, which would have already been a feat, they brought the daemons to the forefront, and the daemons really shone. The daemons weren’t trivialized or cutified to a silly Disney prototype (which most of the animals in Lion were). They were really creative and elaborately crafted.

And then the scenery, dust, everything was just exquisite. One big challenge with fantasy must communicating the etherealness of time, as many fantasy stories are, like Compass, not supposed to take place in any particular time or place. From what I remember, the book may have called for a sort of an alternative universe. Instead of trying to figure out clothes, machines, and buildings that would abstain from attachment to any particular era of human history, the makers of Compass accomplished their goal by mixing various past eras with elements that were clearly futuristic. This was very effective. I felt like I was nowhere at any time.

I’m not sure all of what made Lion feel so flat to me. The scenery was fine. The actors may have been good. I think the main problem must have been that the script and the animation were just too formulaic and predictable. I noticed several times in the movie that I was thinking in my head what the next line would be, and then, sure enough, a couple of moments later the actor would say it. I guess that that is because so many of the lines in the script were in the vein of “Oh, Mr. Tumnus!” You’d think they could do better than that.

I’m curious to hear what other people thought about these movies. I saw Compass with Colin and my father, and we all loved it. So far, the few other people I know who have seen the movie did not like it terribly much, and ratings by respected reviewers seem to span the range, leading to an overall low average. Owen and Nicole think that we liked Compass so much because Lyra’s daemon reminded them of our cat Sage. Hmm, you never know :).

 

If you like the word ‘grok’, seek not its origins

Ever since I first grokked the meaning of the word grok, I loved the word. It seemed to have a niche all its own, filling a perfect word void, like any good word should. And it somehow seemed to sound like just like what it meant.

So when I learned that this word came from a science fiction book (damn you, Merriam-Webster Word of the Day!), I was very excited to read more and learn the origins of my beloved word.

Readers: follow not where I have tread!

The word ‘grok’ comes from Robert A Heinlein’s 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. This is the story of Valentine Michael Smith’s return to Earth after being born and raised on Mars. I grant that there are a few interesting concepts in the book, but for the most part (in my opinion of course), this book exhibits some of the worst aspects of science fiction, and some of the worst aspects of fiction in general.

First big problem:

Heinlein was completely unable to separate himself from the time in which he lived. I was anything but surprised to be reminded that the publication date was 1961. There was pretty much no other time that the book could have been written. You could feel it in every character and every interaction. It is a terribly difficult task for an author to write something futuristic that doesn’t betray the biases and assumptions of the time in which he or she is writing, but some authors do a thousand times better than Heinlein did. His concepts of the future were completely constrained to the physically mundane, like flying taxis and carpets made of real grass. Meanwhile, he was so entrenched in the personal dynamics of his own time, so (subconsciously) sure that they were right and true, that he assumed without a second thought that they would be identical centuries hence.

Second big problem:

Heinlein has a message, and he won’t let you free from it. Heinlein clearly thinks that the world is in need of a new religion. The new religion should be an all-encompassing lifestyle of free-love, creating a nest in which members do nothing but have (straight of course, 1961 remember) sex, tell each other that they are God, and convert new members. This nest should be supported by a couple of rich men. Heinlein’s belief system is completely clear, completely unconvincing, and he hits you with it over and over with it. Ouch.

Third big problem:

The characters are annoying. Maybe this is the bias of my own time, or maybe this is just a bias of me, but I truly cannot stand almost any of the characters in the book. I hate listening to them talk, I hate listening to them think, I hate watching them interact. Almost all of the females are identical, and the males are of few varieties. Colin says that someone once told him that there are 3 kinds of male characters in a Heinlein book:

1. Heinlein as a strong, young, sexy man
2. Heinlein as a mature, accomplished, sexy man
3. Heinlein as a wise, learned, sexy man

The female characters are universally maternal, girlish, and turned on by being insulted and discounted by the male characters.Heinlein’s true brilliant discovery was the need for a word in the ‘grok’ in the English language. He clearly knew this was a brilliant discovery, because the word is used in practically every sentence in the book. And it is shoved in in a completely inelegant way. Valentine Michael Smith arrives speaking no English. He learns English quickly and uses no Martian. For most Martian words with no English concept, Valentine just says “I cannot express this in English”. But, completely without explanation or apology, Valentine just uses the word ‘grok’ in every-day speech and expects everybody to understand it. It’s the worst kind of writing – a totally obvious conflict in the story line without a hint of explanation.

At any rate, my quest for the origin of the word grok has entirely spoiled the word for me. I can no longer use the word, nor can I listen to other people use the word, without thinking of this book. I should have lived blissfully in ignorance, and if you love this word, I suggest you learn from my lesson.