The God Delusion

Before I get into this book review, a little background on myself. 

I went to Church of England primary and secondary schools. I was raised Christian. Before this, there was a complication at birth. I sustained a head injury and memory difficulties were first picked up on by my infant teacher when I was 4 years old. I was first psychologically assessed and diagnosed at 9. I didn’t receive any particular support and schoolwork swallowed up much of my life. I don’t recall anyone in primary school having seen the assessment. 

At secondary school – Blue Coat in Oldham – I had similar problems. Assemblies were usually punctuated with Christian ideology, about being good to others and having empathy, yet teachers – I’d say maybe half of them – routinely lacked this. I’m sure most schools (religious or not) contained within them the same problems. 

Due to memory difficulties I had a lot of contact with the Special Educational Needs coordinator, whom we’ll call Mrs G. I’ve written about her before. This teacher in particular lacked empathy, or even basic decency. Among her humiliations, she once threatened to make me drop my trousers in front of the form because I forgot to bring in some money for a sponsored event. (She did not follow through with this, although 11 year-old me believed she was crazy enough to do so.) 

When I got to GCSEs at 14, the workload was just too much. 10 GCSEs were impractical. I had the intelligence to understand certain concepts, but not the energy to flit between different subjects and projects. Instead of support and nurturing… more abuse from Mrs G. 

I visited the deputy head and the head of the school, with my parents, in an attempt to formally drop one subject. Their response: a resounding ‘no.’ They left my mum in tears. 

I received another psych assessment at this time, again diagnosing me with memory difficulties, and this was sent to Mrs G, who (predictably) ignored it. 

So excuse me if a Christian environment doesn’t particularly appeal. 

It wasn’t until I was in my late 20s that I received an accurate psych assessment with a diagnosis for short term memory difficulties. I’ve been learning about my condition and the field of psychology ever since. I’m now 40. The more I’ve learned, the more my life has made sense and the more I’ve been able to do things for myself (operate in a job, cook meals, DIY, plan journeys, etc.). 

Moreover, the more religion of any kind seems nothing other than an irrelevance and an interruption. 

I recently found Richard Dawkins’ 2006 book The God Delusion on offer in Fopp, 2 for £7. (I coupled it with Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares, if you were at all curious.) It’s a weighty, generous analysis of atheism and an excoriation of religion. As much as it’s a rigorously in-depth investigation – 400-odd pages – it has only one solitary point to make: that, as the title suggests, there is no god, and it labours said point for over 400 pages. 

Despite doing so, Dawkins singles out and denounces Christianity, possibly due to this being the main religion he was exposed to. The other 5 of The Big 6 (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism) are largely neglected. No mention of Jewish circumcision of children? No mention of Mohammed’s 9-year-old wife? Of his sword verses, instructing people to kill non-believers? Perhaps a mere year after the London Islamic terror attacks of 7/7 and 21/7 in 2005, Dawkins wasn’t feeling brave enough to tackle this. Shouldn’t The Big 6 have been equally dissected and dismissed? I’m sure they all have their controversies buried (or in plain view) in their religious texts. 

Shouldn’t Dawkins have thrown the net a little further than his own Oxfordshire upbringing? (That said, the guy was born in Nairobi Kenya, but then, that’s probably a more Christian country than the UK.)

Another omission in The God Delusion is any comparison to ancient religions, like the sun-worshippers of Early Egypt or the ritualistic Aztec sacrifices to the Sun-God. A long time ago they may have been, but are these gods any more a fallacy than today’s? And can’t these sacrifices be compared to terrorist atrocities- particularly suicide bombings- happening the world over in the 21st century? 

I wanted more from the book. There’s a huge reference section but no glossary. There’s little mention of how religion unnecessarily pervades other areas of life – there’s perhaps a mention of politics, but none on things like education. Should religious schools still be allowed to operate in the UK / USA in the 2020s? Should support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and other vice-specific groups be encouraging us to hold hands and chant to God, asking us to ‘remove defects of character’? (Bombshell revelation: an addiction is not a defect of character. It’s a neurological compulsion. Such groups do nothing to help addicts.) 

I’ve shared frequently about Andy’s Man Club, the depression support group that I attend weekly. We have a ‘no religion’ rule. It’s just not discussed, and for good reason. We’re not a debate group. In The God Delusion, I didn’t feel that enough was made of the societal handbrake that’s applied when religion creeps its way into facets of our lives where it’s not relevant. 

The world of 2023 is still fighting off COVID-19, a disease thought to have killed 6.72 million people to date. In early 2021, Pfizer released a vaccine that was around 90% effective in preventing the transmission of COVID. Immediately, infection rates plummeted. The vaccine was working. 

The more the vaccine was rolled out, however, the more we realised that there were a cohort of unintelligent, arrogant, clueless weirdos intent on delivering their own spurious narrative: the anti-vaxxers. These people outright refused – and still refuse - to accept the scientific facts on clear display, and were disgusted that someone was ‘trying to make them have something in their bodies.’ 

A good number of these people are openly religious, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. One of my former friends – a staunch Catholic, no less – I’ve kept in my Facebook just so I can watch on with a sense of bemusement (and horror) at how far down the rabbit hole of conspiracy she tumbled. 

My point being, if you live with one delusion, you're going to be susceptible to many others too. 

As much of a modern day classic The God Delusion has become, one can’t help thing that Dawkins failed to grasp the nettle and condemn the concept of religion totally. He failed, also, I believe, to properly investigate the kinds of sciences that we have available to us – and had 17 years ago at publication date. We now know so much about the human brain, about neuropsychology, about how belief systems develop in the mind, and about sociology, and how society acts and how individuals mimic each other. And it’s this scientific knowledge, along with other types of science (satellites orbiting the Earth predicting the weather, for example) that is rendering all religion a total irrelevance. There is genuinely no benefit to religion that can’t be matched or outdone by some other, non-religious, activity. 

The book makes all this abundantly clear, but, despite The God Delusion literally being about nothing, there was so, so much more that it could have said.