Dawkins Post #2 (in which I atheist bait*)

In my earlier post I thought about calling Richard Dawkins a “pompous windbag”, but I decided calling him a “pompous fraud” did him the credit of not thinking him so stupid as to actually believe that his atheist tracts represent a sophisticated approach to the subject. Richard Dooling’s assessment of Dawkins pretty much mirrors my own:

I recently read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. Lucky for me, I found nothing in those books that I hadn’t already encountered during my excellent education at the hands of the Jesuits. I haven’t heard an original argument against the existence of God since I graduated from Saint Louis University in 1976, and frankly the Jesuits frame these ideas better than Messrs. Dawkins and Hitchens. Consequently, arguments against the existence of God hold no terrors for me; I still believe.

And this piece about Dooling’s latest book has another good line:

The author calls Richard Dawkins’s bestselling book The God Delusion “a collection of arguments that most liberal-arts students encounter before their junior year” and are bored of by graduation. He confesses that he read the polemic “out of curiosity, same way I’d read a book by Mother Teresa if she had suddenly decided to write one called The Math Delusion“—a subject she would have been utterly unqualified to weigh in on.

I’d never heard of Dooling until yesterday (h/t Damir). When I learned he’s got a flair for Dawkins mocking, my curiosity was piqued. When I read that he begins “every novel with the vow that I will not write about technology, Catholicism, or hell” but ends up “writing about all three”, I fell in love. I’m reading his non-fiction Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ right now and am considering suing him for writing about all my ideas before I even had them.

*I know I know: Dawkins’ opinions don’t represent those of all atheists—just the slaphdash ones.