Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel

I bought Infidel the other day because it had been highly recommended in a number of other books that I've read recently. I don't have much to say about it other than that it was an amazingly interesting book that everyone should read.

There were a couple of particularly interesting points in the book. The first was that contrary to some of the reviews I've read the book does not paint all Muslims with the same brush. Ali makes no attempt to argue that all Muslim people believe the same things. As an example, her father believed that female genital mutilation and beating his wife were barbaric, but still saw no problem in arranging his daughter's wedding without her consent.

The biggest strength of Infidel in my opinion is its denunciation of moral relativism in her argument that Holland's attempt at complete respect for the cultures of refugees allows cultural traditions that are harmful for members of society to survive and thrive. I recently had an argument in class with a friend on the issue of moral relativism, and I'd like to show him the passages in Infidel where Ali talks about genital mutilation and spousal abuse. The mutilation sections in particular would provide especially strong evidence in support of my argument that just because a practice comes from a tradition that is foreign to me does not mean that it cannot be criticized. The protection of the vulnerable regardless of who they are or where they are from is far more important than not offending someone by speaking out against their beliefs or practices. Just because someone is born into a culture that treats them like near-valueless property does not mean that they are any less worthy of protection and basic rights than someone who is born into our culture.

Infidel was an incredible book, and I would highly recommend it. I would especially recommend it to those liberals who feel like criticizing the cultural or religious traditions of others is an unbreakable taboo. As Sam Harris puts it, currently the only ones loudly denouncing the ills in other cultures are those on the extreme right, who do so with the wrong motivations and the wrong methods.

Michelle Goldberg - Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism

I bought Kingdom Coming the other day because it looked like it would be an interesting take on the political aspirations of the Christian far right in the United States, and it definitely was. Goldberg made a number of good points, although the fact that the book is now seven years old means that some of her arguments are somewhat out of date.

What I found most interesting about Kingdom Coming was Goldberg's look at the various strategies used by Christian nationalists to gain power in the United States. She makes very good observations about issues ranging from the problems of children home schooled by Christian nationalist parents to the extensive use of revisionist history to "prove" that America was founded as a Christian nation and that only recently has it become secular.

Much of the book was dedicated to looking at the various fronts of the so-called culture wars in the United States. I thought that Goldberg made a very interesting point by arguing that with anti-Semitism and racism largely pushed to the side by Christian nationalists (it is still present, just not officially acknowledged or supported) the idea of a "homosexual agenda" has filled the void left by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion prior to World War Two. When discussing the battles over teaching intelligent design and abstinence-only in classrooms despite the scientific evidence against both, Goldberg made excellent points regarding the evangelical Christian use of "truth." In the case of sex education, she quotes proponents of abstinence-only programs as saying that they don't care whether or not the programs prevent pregnancy or the spread of STDs, only that students are taught the "truth" about the consequences of sin. For intelligent design's supporters the argument seems to be that it doesn't matter how much scientific evidence is against them, the only way to actually have the truth is through references to the divine.

Goldberg's closing section on how those on the secular left can push back against Christian nationalists outlined a number of very interesting strategies that involve a complete reformation of the American electoral system and a call for those on the left to become just as politically organized (especially on local levels) and as loud as those on the right.

Since the book was written about seven years ago a lot has changed, and some of this is reflected in the epilogue written in December 2006 after the American mid-term elections. Not only has a Democratic president been elected twice since then, but political support for marriage equality, which Goldberg described as political suicide in 2006, has become commonplace among Democrats and has started to creep into Republican ranks as well. I would be very interested to see an updated and revised version of the book published with current developments taken into consideration.

Kingdom Coming presents a terrifying vision of what America might become if the religious right continues to gain power, but thankfully it looks like that tide has turned somewhat. I would definitely recommend the book despite it being somewhat out of date.

Nicholson Baker - Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

I decided to take a break from atheism-related books for a day and turn back to World War Two. I bought Human Smoke years ago when I still had some vestiges of pacifism from my Mennonite upbringing. I wanted to see if there were any good pacifist arguments against the war, but Human Smoke provided none. Instead it provided a huge number of out of context quotes and incidents that generally placed the blame for the war on Great Britain and America. There were so many things wrong with this book that it is difficult to know where to start except to say that it is very easy to prove any point you want when you only use carefully selected snippets, and even easier when you provide a bibliography but absolutely no in-text citations to show where your quotes and anecdotes are from. Baker's style of using these snippets with no personal interpretation allows him to portray the book as being an unbiased look at just the facts, but his failure to examine all of the facts quickly shows his biases. Overall, Human Smoke is designed to give the impression that the Allies were the true mass butchers of the war, while the Germans only hurt the Jews and truly wanted peace and the Japanese were dragged into a war against their will after barely harming anyone. All of this is of course completely ludicrous.

I will start by looking at Baker's perspective that the war was the fault of the Allies, specifically Churchill and Roosevelt. Baker provides huge numbers of quotes to show that Churchill and Roosevelt were both eager to get into the war against the Axis. All of this is true, they did want to get into the war, but this eagerness and their work towards it does not mean that it was wrong for those countries to go to war. Quite the contrary, as I will look at below. Frequently throughout the book Baker tries to paint a picture that Germany and Japan did not want to get into the war, but that they were pushed into it by the Allies. Bakers claim that the German high command had no taste for war is bullshit, what they had no taste for was the idea that a corporal would take their power and lead a war. They were perfectly happy both when Hitler was rearming them and when the Germans were initially successful in the war. The crowning moment of Baker's willful blindness comes when he states that Hitler's peace offer to Great Britain just after conquering France was the dictator's "last appeal to reason." Painting Hitler as a man of reason who badly wanted peace that Britain wouldn't give him is not only factually incorrect, it is disgusting. Baker is equally bad when discussing the Japanese. He claims through his selective quotations that the Japanese had no taste for war with the United States because they didn't want war at all, when the truth is that they didn't want to fight the Americans because they were not certain that they could win. His claim that the American oil embargo on Japan forced Japan to attack the United States is correct on the surface, but he ignores the atrocities in China that Japan had been using that oil to perpetrate. He further claims that the Japanese navy ignored the "provocation" of American oil tankers sailing past them to Russia but leaves the impression that they did so because they didn't want war, not because attacking those tankers would have been a strategically idiotic move to make.

Another of Baker's major faults in Human Smoke is his wholehearted acceptance of the naivete of pacifism, specifically Gandhi's brand of it. His frequent mention of Gandhi gives the impression that satyagraha would have worked, when it clearly would not have. Gandhi's brand of resistance is extremely effective, but only when directed at a society that is unwilling to engage in mass slaughter. The British were willing to imprison tens of thousands of resisters, fire upon demonstrators, and kill some innocent people, but under no circumstances would they have rounded up thousands of resisters and executed them on the spot. Having that line meant that Gandhi's protest could be successful because the British were eventually pushed to a point where they either had to cross the line or give in to India's demands. Under no circumstances would that have worked against Hitler or the Japanese who both showed that they had no problems with rounding up and murdering people by the thousands in full view of the world. Another major flaw with Baker's use of pacifist arguments is that he seems to think that war could have been avoided if only Britain had made peace with Germany or the United States had disarmed and been friendly towards the Japanese. It is true that had the Allies done these things the Second World War as we know it would not have happened. Instead, the Germans would have swept through Europe and Africa with little resistance and would likely have had enough resources to push back against Russia, finishing their Final Solution, enslaving the Slavs of Eastern Europe, and setting up an empire that would have been unequaled in the world. The Japanese would have been able to continue their march through Asia unabated raping and slaughtering as they went. The point is that Britain and America becoming pacifist nations wouldn't have saved lives, it would just have exposed different lives to death (and probably more of them). Baker seems also to ignore that Chamberlain tried the peaceful approach before the war began but all that did was encourage Hitler to keep going. Had the Allies stepped in to enforce the Versailles Treaty or if they had put their feet down to stop the Anschluss or the invasion of Czechoslovakia the war in Europe might have been over before it began. It is remarkable how seldom Baker shows actual proof of pacifist actions by German or Japanese citizens the way he does British or American. Clearly this is because such actions were extremely rare despite Baker's claims that those countries really only wanted peace. Baker's portrayal of pacifism in Human Smoke does no more than convince me that when applied on a national scale (as opposed to individually with conscientious objectors) it is a position of profound selfishness. Those pacifists clamoring for the American government to disarm and stop the Japanese embargo or stop the Lend-Lease program and make peace with Hitler were doing no more than saying that so long as they didn't have to die or kill it was perfectly alright for other people that they would never meet to die instead.

Finally, I want to look at another theme that runs through Human Smoke, that of the Allies as butchers. It is completely true that the Allies committed what can only be termed atrocities, as it is that Churchill was a profoundly bad peacetime leader who bungled the handling of Indian independence and often acted with savagery. It remains true however that regardless of the bad decisions made and atrocities committed during the war, not having gone to war would have been undoubtedly worse for the world as a whole. The choice was not, as Baker implies towards the beginning of the book, between accepting Churchill's decisions and having war or rejecting them and not. The choice was between accepting the decisions of a flawed leader and having a war that in the end stopped Nazism and Japanese imperialism and rejecting the war and allowing the horrors of Hitler and Hirohito to run rampant over the world.

Baker ends the book by saying that the pacifists of the 1940s "failed, but they were right." I would rephrase that to say that they failed because of their ludicrous level of naivete about human nature and how the world works. Pacifism is a great concept that fails as soon as the other guy isn't a pacifist and but is content to let you sit there spouting your platitudes while he slaughters others. I'm not sure that I can really recommend Human Smoke, but it was certainly interesting to see how easy it is to put together a revisionist history that is on the surface supported by carefully chosen facts.

David Mills - Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism

As with Godless, I picked up Atheist Universe a few weeks ago on the advise of Amazon. Overall, I was disappointed by the book. While I agreed with many of Mills' conclusions, I found that his writing style was often poor and that his arguments were not fully thought out or well presented.

The book starts out badly, with Mills engaged in a hypothetical interview in which his atheism is questioned. The "interview" is rather tedious and although it raises some good points and refutes some common misconceptions, Mills also uses it to make somewhat bizarre claims. In response to a question about whether or not atheists celebrate Christmas, he asserts that we instead "celebrate the Winter Solstice." I have never met anyone, atheist or otherwise, who celebrates the Winter Solstice (although I'm sure some people do), but I do know many atheists who celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday. As the book progresses, Mills also outlines what he claims to be creationist arguments but are for the most part generalities. Certainly his hypothetical arguments represent the views of some creationists, but he generally chooses to illustrate the most simplistic of creationist arguments. It does not help the case of atheism to set up creationist straw men.

His biggest failed argument in my opinion is his discussion of the existence of hell. I am not entirely sure why the discussion of whether hell exists or not is included in the book, since this argument is entirely based on the belief that god exists in the first place, but Mills has for some reason devoted a chapter to it. Taking a look at the chapter on the basis of evaluation the merits of its arguments shows a number of places where his logic fails. First, he uses the analogy of a boy who deliberately breaks a window and whose mother promises to punish him. There are two possible reasons for the punishment, according to Mills; either to punish him for his actions or to deter him from doing it again. Since only the latter option serves a practical purpose, Mills believes that option two is the real reason why the boy is punished. This is ridiculous, as punishment based on retribution is extremely common. One only has to look at the vindictive nature of gang conflict or the legal practices in many Islamist states (in Saudi Arabia, for example, a man was recently sentenced to paralysis in punishment for accidentally paralyzing his friend). The second major flaw in his logic comes when he applies the lessons he has drawn from the window analogy to the actions of god. He states that since hell serves no purpose either to rehabilitate (since the people there are not getting out) or to deter future crimes by the person (again, they're there for the long haul) then its only purpose is retribution. Since this serves no logical purpose then god would not have created it and therefore hell doesn't exist (I would argue that since god doesn't exist then neither does hell, but apparently that's too easy for Mills). There are numerous problems with this line of argument. First, if one accepts the existence of god and therefore the possibility of hell, then hell could hypothetically be serving the same purpose as the death penalty, namely to deter others from committing the crime that the guilty party has (this doesn't work, but it that doesn't seem to matter to the proponents of either capital punishment or hell). Second, there is no reason to think, as Mills apparently does, that the Judeo-Christian god would not create hell solely as a place to punish the guilty with no further purpose in terms of either rehabilitation or deterrence of the guilty or the public. The old testament is rife with examples that prove Yahweh to be a petty, jealous, and vindictive god capable of wiping out whole cities for not believing in him or of tearing children limb from limb via bears for insulting his prophets. Such a god would surely be only to happy to create a place to eternally torture those who disobey him.

All of this is not to say that Mills does not make some good arguments. He does a good job of pointing out the hypocrisy of believing in miracles by (as he puts it) counting the hits and ignoring the misses. It is common for people to claim that miraculous healings are god's will, while sudden deaths are either put down to random chance or are part of a "divine plan." He also does a good job of pointing out that liberal Christians and proponents of intelligent design (as opposed to creationism) are arbitrarily choosing which parts of the bible to acknowledge as truth and which to ignore for their own convenience.

In general I disliked Atheist Universe. It was by turns tedious and poorly argued and in my opinion does not really advance the critical scholarship in support of atheism. Setting up straw men and logically flawed arguments only serves to allow christian apologists to claim victory in debate when they should not be able to. I would not recommend the book as a tool in convincing a believer that their beliefs are untrue.

Dan Barker - Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists

I bought Godless a few weeks ago after it was recommended to me on Amazon, and I have mixed feelings about it. I really enjoyed the beginning and end where Barker talked about his own life, but I didn't care for the arguments in the middle terribly much. Partially this was because he is repeating the same arguments that I have read in so many other books lately, and partially because I did not find his style of argument nearly as interesting as Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, or Russell.

By far the most interesting part of Godless is Barker's retrospective look on his life as an evangelical preacher. It was fascinating to see the inner workings of so-called faith healings as well as how Barker's belief that the world would soon end coloured his worldview. His tiny shifts in opinion from being a fundamentalist to a liberal Christian to an atheist were also very interesting, particularly as he talked about how he didn't really realize that he was changing.

As I said, his arguments were not as interesting to me as those made in other books, but he did make two very compelling points. First was his look at how if god exists and justifies his orders to humans then he is appealing to a force or ethic outside of himself and is therefore not the source of morality, but that if he does not justify his orders then he is no more than a petty tyrant. The second compelling point was his look at how the Jesus story fits the pattern of other legends. For one thing, it has many of the same elements that older mythologies had (messiah figure born of a virgin, death and resurrection of the messiah figure, etc). Second, the growth of the miraculous elements in the story as time went by follows the typical pattern of legend growth. The earliest accounts of Jesus' life (written by Paul) have no miracles, the next (the Gospel of Mark) has a few, all the way until the most recent (John) which has many. Finally, for those who claim that the growth of Christianity occurred far too fast for it to have been based on a legend Barker points out a variety of quick-spreading legends that have influenced many including the Millerites (now Seventh Day Adventists) and the Mormons.

In general I enjoyed Godless, but I wish that Barker had devoted more time and detail to his life within Christianity and his path to leaving it rather than on his arguments against the existence of God.

Charles P. Pierce - Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

I found Idiot America through a list of recommended books on Amazon, and I decided that I would give it a chance despite being somewhat leery of the title. For the most part I enjoyed it and I didn't really disagree with many of Pierce's arguments. However, I found that it dragged on somewhat and at times Pierce belabored his point.

Pierce's basic premise is that the rise of anti-intellectualism in the United States coupled with a redefinition of what is the truth (essentially truth has become anything that sells, is believed by a large number of people, and is said loudly enough) has led to a dangerous decline in America. Pierce gives an interesting background on what he says is the history of public "cranks" in America, essentially those individuals who expressed ludicrous ideas and attracted some attention, but who were generally ignored and were therefore harmless. According to Pierce, the existence of mass media has allowed those cranks to gain exposure to a wide audience and a platform that gives them authority, which places them in positions of influence and power that they should not occupy. This situation is exacerbated by the tendency of many major TV networks and other news outlets to give equal or greater time to self-professed "experts" on topics that they are not qualified to speak about as they do to actual experts.

Pierce looks at a number of issues to illustrate just how truth is easily redefined. He uses the example of the non-existent NAFTA super-highway as one issue that went from being a crazy conspiracy to a national discussion (and had influence in federal elections) because of the vicious cycle of the news media giving it coverage because people were interested, which made more people interested, which fueled more coverage. Pierce also looks at the right-wing dominated medium of talk radio as an area where truth is redefined by talking heads who have a wide audience eager to lap up what they dish out.

Pierce then goes on to illustrate how this redefinition of truth has given rise to what he calls "Idiot America," which is manipulated by those in power (particularly the right) to drown out opposition and sell their spin on issues. He surveys everything from the Terry Schiavo case to creationism to global warming deniers to the Iraq War. In general I found this to be the least interesting section of the book. It was well written and researched, but Pierce at times seemed to be beating his point into the reader, which got somewhat tedious. This is especially true in the lengthy section on the Iraq War, although that might have been because many of his points have been made repeatedly over the last decade by a wide range of other people.

Overall I enjoyed Idiot America, but I definitely found the first half or so of the book to be better than the last half. It also was definitely not a book that I think would change many minds on the issue, it was more in the style of preaching to the choir.