Why read this book?

These excerpts speak for the book:

[Referring to Julia Sweeny ] My first call from my mother was more of a scream. ‘Atheist? ATHEIST?!?!’ […] I think that my parents had been mildly disappointed when I’d said I didn’t believe in God any more, but being an atheist was another thing altogether.

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The same tendency to glory in the quaintness of ethnic religious habits, and to justify cruelties in their name, crops up again and again. It is the source of squirming internal conflict in the mind of nice liberal people who, on the one hand, cannot bear suffering and cruelty, but on the other hand have been trained by postmodernists and relativists to respect other cultures no less than their own. Female circumcision is undoubtedly hideously painful […] one half of the decent liberal mind wants to abolish the practice. The other half, however, ‘respects’ ethnic cultures and feels that we should not interfere if ‘they’ want to mutilate ‘their’ girls. The point, of course, is that ‘their’ girls are actually the girls’ own girls, and their wishes should not be ignored.

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Polls suggest that approximately 95 per cent of the population of the United States believe they will survive their own death. […] Why don’t religious people talk like that when in the presence of the dying? Could it be that they don’t really believe all that stuff they pretend to believe?

The book:

See also:

• Richard Dawkins website