There aren't many people who go through life without wondering what it is all about
The world's smartest thinkers have mulled it over time and time again.
Billions of words in millions of books have been written on this subject, and yet no one is any closer to an answer.
It's about time a less wordy version was made available, a book on God that you can read in the length of a taxi ride.
Yes, what is it all about?
This is how Paul Arden's God Explained in a Taxi Ride starts. I picked it up because it was right between Dawkins' The God Delusion and Hitchens' God Is Not Great at my local book store, and it had a glossy cover. Quite possibly I need to stop picking up random books on the assumption that they can't be that bad if they made it all the way to the book store.
I'll be reviewing this entire thing line by line, which isn't actually as daunting as it sounds, since Arden correctly guessed that people looking to have their superficial feel-good notions about religion reinforced without actually having to examine them have fairly short attention spans. The whole thing is written like a children's book, with each pair of pages having maybe three lines of text and a pretty picture (this one has a drawing of a taxi sign saying ``God''), and there are only about 120 pages.
If you want a sentence-fragment review, though: mealy-mouthed mush.
Incidentally, you may have noticed his first factual error came three lines in, which is actually better than average for this sort of book.
The Meter's Running
Darwin says there is no such thing as God.
There is only science and evolution.
That is too stark for most of us. We need a soulmate: we gaze upwards to find him.
Most of us need something spiritual to believe in. Man cannot live on bread alone.
That is the nub of this book.
``Nub'' is right. The picture is a highway sign, showing a highway to ``Darwin'' (apparently we're driving in Australia), with an exit marked ``God'', which I'm pretty sure is in Alabama.
If you're taking the first line as a sign that Arden is going to try to cram as many braindead religious stereotypes into this tiny book as he possibly can, you can probably stop reading, because you already know how this is going to go down.
I Dunno
Because we don't know what life is all about, we spend a great deal of time seeking answers.
There are no answers. We will never find them.
God in his infinite wisdom has made it that way, so that life becomes infinitely interesting.
It's the unknown that makes life so rich.
Drivel. A life where ``the answers'' are not just unknown but unknowable isn't ``infinitely interesting'', it's harrowingly absurd.
Pursuing answers to questions is only worth doing if the possibility of finding them exists. If it doesn't, the questions are meaningless.
Of course, no hint is given as to what questions Arden has in mind, and a fact-free ``God'' is invoked for no apparent reason. This page isn't meant to provoke thought, as he presumably thought when he wrote it; it's meant to elicit self-righteous back-patting from mush-brained ``moderate believers''.
What's Going On?
God Knows
So Help Me God!
When things go wrong in normal life, we get by with a little help from our friends.
When we need help that our friends cannot provide, we seek consolation in an idea and the name we give to the idea is God.
(The backdrop for the first two lines is a starry expanse with half of a confused face in it. The picture with the last part is a lady holding tea asking ``More tea, vicar?''.)
More than religion incidentally being a crutch (which most believers would claim), he defines God as being nothing but a crutch. This would be revealing if not for the fact that he contradicts himself later on. He's trying to appeal to a general sense of feel-good ``belief in belief'' in as many people as possible, while remaining as fact-free as possible so as not to lose anyone. Except, of course, atheists, as we'll see.
Cutting Out The Middle Man
We all have our own direct line to God.
We don't need preachers or prophets.
We just have to believe that a power or force exists that is in itself perfect.
But not many people will accept this.
It's too simple. We have to make things complicated.
And heaven knows, does the Church ever make things complicated!
Controversy! Organised religion is inconveniently outspoken on divisive subjects, interfering with Arden's desperate need to believe in belief!
The picture is a dude in a white collar following an arrow that says ``Job Centre'', which I believe is British for ``Unemployment Office''.
Arden sees the recent increase in the vociferousness of atheists as being driven by disillusionment with organised religion, which may be partly true. This is a blatant appeal to people still on the fence, trying to convince them that it's not god-belief that's the problem, but people in white collars specifically. It'd be depressing if it weren't so transparent and predictable.
When Things Go Wrong
When things don't work out the way we want them to, we maintain our faith by shrugging our shoulders and saying…
'God works in mysterious ways.'
I was waiting for a condemnation here—maybe something corny saying that it's wrong to blame God for everything that goes wrong in the world and that free will blah blah. But no, this is all there's to this. Apparently it's advice.
You Don't Need A Religion
In the book Life of Pi, a young Indian boy comes across three good men. Each has a different faith.
Each in turn explains their religion to him.
All are equally valid, and he doesn't know which to choose.
So he doesn't choose.
This'd be more convincing if these three faiths weren't mutually exclusive (and violently so).
I actually read Life of Pi before it got seized on by middle-ground religious morons as an example of how different religions can get along, and I found the discussion with the Christian, Muslim, and Hindu to be a very unimportant part of the whole thing, and demonstrative of the deeply divisive nature of religion (and the cowardly mush-brainedness of the protagonist). Presumably Yann Martel didn't feel that way when he wrote it.
The ``equally valid'' line is particularly funny here, and most members of any of those three religions would strongly disagree. It does, however, reinforce the trend of this book: all ``world-views'' are equally valid, and there is no way to distinguish opinion from truth. Unless people don't believe in God, of course. Then they're just wrong.
I don't know why Arden and people like him believe this mealy-mouthed relativistic nonsense is so appealing. It just lays bare their intellectual dishonesty.
The Trinity
When I was young, I went to church every Sunday, and the rector spoke of the Trinity: God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
The reverend never explained these things; they were read out and we would join in parrot-fashion, not knowing what we were talking about.
Nevertheless, I accepted these things in the name of God.
I am certainly not the only person to have puzzled over this conundrum.
So I thought I would make a stab at understanding it.
Not, of course, questioning whether it's true. No, a priori accepting that it is, and then trying to mold his idea of reality to fit with it.
So Who or What is God the Father?
No one has ever seen him.
Maybe he doesn't exist.
If he didn't exist, man would have to invent him.
So close, and yet so far.
Note also the lowercase Hs on ``him'' and ``he''. Remember, organised religion is bad.
What is the Holy Ghost?
There is no explanation for what is the Holy Ghost.
Maybe that's because nobody understands.
I have a better hypothesis.
Bzzzzt.Who is the Son?
Jesus actually existed.
His life has been recorded, glorified and dramatized.
From what we read in the Bible, he was an intelligent and charismatic man who could pull a crowd.
Like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, he was a pacifist,
Luke 14:26, Luke 22:36, Matt 10:35-36, &c., &c.
That's without even touching on Revelation.
and, from what we know, a good man, who gave his life for his people.
And his people alone.
His story has been told and retold so many times that it is difficult to separate fact from fiction.
Especially since the guys who told it first were making it up as they went along, of course.
It Ain't Necessarily So
I'm not saying the events described in the Bible didn't happen.
Maybe they just didn't happen the way the Scriptures tell us.
Close call! We almost took a stand there that could have alienated some people!
The picture here is two books, side by side, one labelled Holy Bible, and one labelled Shakespeare. The caption reads ``Two great works of fiction?''. Because, you know, Shakespeare is a great work of fiction.
The Greatest Story Ever Told
The Bible is a great read, but like Chinese whispers, the truth of it has become distorted.
It's hard to tell where history stops and legend begins.
It was written long after the death of Jesus, from word of mouth and hearsay.
Translated from Hebrew into Greek and Latin, again from Latin into English, and then retranslated into what we know today as the King James Bible.
It is a book the Church wants you to believe in.
It is the Church's Bible, not God's.
I maintain that anyone who thinks the Bible is a great read hasn't actually read any of it.
Also note his very shaky grasp on the history of the modern Bible. The NT was originally written in Koine Greek, and the NT part of the KJV is a direct translation of those Greek texts. Greek texts which, incidentally, we still have. There are a lot of very good arguments against the bullshit that is biblical literalism, but this Chinese whispers one is a phenomenally weak one. It's also a depressingly popular one among feebleminded big-tent morons.
But of course, it's atheists who are attacking a straw-man version of religion.
If Arden was shooting for out-reach rather than divisiveness here, by the way, he's greatly underestimating how many fundamentalists there are compared to ``moderate'' religious people. But then, ``moderates'' tend to.
The picture is a book labelled ``Property of the Church''. Because remember, the real problem is organised religion.
(If there really was a Jesus, he would probably have spoken Aramaic, not Hebrew. That's about the only thing Mel Gibson got right.)
Miracles
They are a bit of a problem, but can be explained in terms of illusions.
As today we have conjurors and illusionists who perform miracles on television, so there were clever people in Jesus's day who could magic up a few tricks.
Take walking on water.
A boardwalk just under the surface provides an excellent platform for a miracle.
When someone is a star, as Jesus was, people latch on to them: often clever people who want a bit of light to shine on them too.
Jesus had disciples and, like any star, roadies to manage his tours.
Why bother with the whole supernatural tomfoolery at all, then, if you aren't even going to believe your own bullshit yourself?
Also, the boardwalk thing just shows he hasn't actually read the Bible. The walking-on-water thing wasn't just Jesus calmly walking over a quiet lake, after all.
Is This What Really Happened?
Christ was taken down from the cross by his friends whilst still alive.
He was then placed in a cave, and a boulder was rolled across to block the entrance. His friends attended him and tried to keep him alive.
Three days later he died.
Metaphorically this could be regarded as his ascension into heaven.
His friends rolled away the stone and buried him in an unknown location.
It's a possibility.
And then he went to Japan and studied theology for twelve years, having left his little brother, Jsus Chri, to die for him. And of course, later he also went to North America to found Mormonism.
These fact-free rationalisations never cease to amaze me. There's a much simpler, much more likely explanation right in front of you.
Note also that most Christians won't appreciate a de-deification of their god.
Blind Faith
How can you have blind faith in something for which there is not a scrap of evidence?
Well, the answer is you can't.
If you could prove it, it wouldn't be faith.
You can only have faith in what you don't know.
That's what faith is.
Does this make sense to you? It doesn't make sense to me. I think Arden needs a better proofreader.
The picture is a dude with a halo wearing a blindfold, of course. Willful ignorance is a virtue, after all.
The Answer is Blowing in the Wind
A young child asked his father if he could prove there is a God.
'I can't prove it,' he said.
'It's like the wind. You can feel it, but you can't see it.'
And much like God, the wind has to be accepted upon faith, because there is no actual evidence to show it exists besides a ``feeling'', right?
Also, questioning whether God exists is something only small children do.
Proof of God
In the fifteenth century, St Anselm was made a saint for his proof of God's existence. It might take another taxi ride to get your head round this!
You know what? Fuck it. I'm not going to type his fucking ontological argument out yet again. Fuck you, Arden, and fuck you, Anselm of Canterbury, for providing weakminded morons with yet another thing they think they can pat themselves on the back for.
Are you brave enough not to believe in God?
Appeal to emotion and to consequences in one bite-sized sentence!
The picture is a tiny, tiny dude in a vast expanse of white, to drive home the point that a universe without God must be terribly lonely. I swear, it's like he's fucking four years old. Except that some four-year-olds actually question the existence of God, like in his stupid little example earlier.
God Helps Those Who Help Themselves
We are God.
We are made of the same matter that makes the universe.
So when we pray, we also pray to ourselves.
It's not about prayer.
It's about wanting.
If we pray lightly and for many things, they probably won't come to us because we don't really want them.
If we pray hard and long enough for one thing, we often get what we want.
That's why chairs are also carpenters and every little girl out there has a pony and all cancer patients get better and there's been world peace for over two thousand years.
I can't tell if this is supposed to be covering for the fact that prayer doesn't work or if it's some The Secret type of bullshit.
Graven Image
Jesus is nearly always portrayed with high cheekbones and a kind expression, in a way that we would consider handsome.
That's how we see him today. It's the way he is depicted on film. Today, Johnny Depp would be cast as Jesus.
We don't know what he looked like. He could have been a little fat man squatting like the Buddha, or a bald man like Gandhi.
He might even have looked like Osama bin Laden.
Paul Arden's ignorance doesn't limit itself to just his own religion, of course. Protip: the Gautama Buddha was ascetic for most of his life, and there's a reason the 32 marks of the Buddha describe a man of god-like physique.
Sunday's Thought for the Day
Hindus do not eat cows.
Anglicans eat beef on Sundays.
One man's sin is another man's roast dinner.
But of course, all views are equally valid and these religions are not mutually exclusive.
Heathens
They may have been barbaric, but they were very smart in the way they thought about religion.
They had many gods.
If they wanted rain, they prayed to the rain god and it rained, or maybe it didn't.
If they had a tummy ache, they prayed to the god of pain and if they were favoured the pain went away.
They were talking to God through things they understood.
Very simple, very truthful.
Not so heathen.
Any belief is fine, so long as you believe.
This condescending view that every religion worships some aspect of the same god is patronising beyond belief. I'm not even sure what Arden thinks ``heathen'' means, considering how brain-damaged this little caricature is.
An Awkward Parishioner
The Eskimo asked the missionary, 'Will I go to heaven or hell?'
The missionary said, 'To heaven.'
'Would I go to hell if I didn't know anything about it?' asked the Eskimo.
'No,' the missionary said.
The Eskimo said, 'Why did you tell me about it then?'
Think about it.
Good thing he added that italicised ``Think about it'', or we might not have realised this was supposed to be thought-provoking!
The idea here, of course, is that the missionary is only looking to increase the power of Organised Religion™, and not interested in saving the savages' souls. Never mind the fact that most brands of Christianity don't actually believe people who don't know about Christianity don't go to Hell, and that many of them would condemn the priest to Hell for believing he has the power to tell people they're not going to Hell.
(This is actually a quote from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won a Pulitzer in 1975. Dillard was one of those people who found C.S. Lewis's theology convincing, so it's unsurprising Arden would like her, even though it would take another two decades after she wrote this for her to convert to Christianity.)
Atheism
Mankind does not really want to live without a God.
As the Communists have discovered, atheism is too barren an outlook to live with for very long.
Spiritually we need dear old God, but we want him on our terms, under our control.
My favorite bit! The picture, I shit you not, is Stalin holding a placard saying ``I need a comrade''.
Did you know the fact that people craved God in their diet is actually the reason Communism fell? Not the fact that they couldn't run an economy and an arms race at the same time, or the fact that Stalin turned the whole thing into a deadly cult of personality. No, people just wanted to go to church on Sundays.
Similarly, all atheists in the world (all 1.1 billion of them) are deeply unhappy and just longing for the day they can believe in God again.
Paul Arden, you are an ignorant douchenozzle.
Fighting Talk
You will know the story of the tower of Babel, where men were building a tower to get closer to God.
Will we? Because you don't appear to.
It was really built for their own self-glorification.
So God decided to restrain them by making them speak different languages.
Suddenly, they started to argue and pass judgement on each other.
The project collapsed.
Speaking different languages leads to misunderstanding, which leads to animosity, which leads to fighting.
There have been many wars in the name of religion simply because people speak different languages.
Most religions are different ways of saying the same thing. But we hear things differently because we all speak different languages.
That is why we have misunderstandings and that is why we have wars.
We fight our neighbours because we don't understand them, not because we disagree with them.
Generously granting that he means the language thing metaphorically (and that he isn't suggesting that two countries speaking the same language never go to war), his continued insistence that all religions of the world are mutually compatible is profoundly ignorant. Why is it always the religious who seem to know the least about religion, both their own and that of other people?
(The picture is one of two people facing each other and crossing tongues. This doesn't actually suggest an argument to me, but maybe I'm special.)
The History of War
Different people, different terrain, different weather, different food, different customs, different houses, different religions.
As man travelled more, he told others of his religion, and other told him about theirs.
That's when the problems started!
More blood has been shed over religion than any other issue.
Our refusal to understand the beliefs of others is why we continue to have religious wars to this day.
He's right about the fact that more blood has been shed over religion than any other issue, at least, but he doesn't seem to believe people can understand each other's beliefs (maybe because he doesn't even understand his own) and still hate each other over them. The Abrahamic splits didn't happen because people didn't understand their own beliefs, and Muslims and Christians and Jews have been at each other's throats as violently as anyone.
Why Does God Need You To Defend Him?
It must be because you think you are more powerful than your God.
If you think your God is weaker than you, that's not much of a faith.
Does it not follow, then, that people who fight wars for religion don't have much faith?
Does it not follow, then, that people who write worthless little books defending their own view of religion are hypocrites?
(And no, it does not follow that people who fight religious wars don't have much faith. If a holy book says non-believers are an affront to God, as most do, fighting them isn't ``defending your God'', it's just carrying out his will.)
Suicide Bombers
Young men are asked to strap bombs to their bodies to blow themselves and innocent people up.
They have been told that this will guarantee them an early place in heaven.
They are asked to undertake what the people asking them to do have not themselves done.
At least Jesus died himself.
If anyone suggests that you become a martyr, say…
'You first.'
Because every suicide bomber is directly pressed into it by other people, not because of his own religious beliefs, and people who instruct suicide bombers never die for their own cause. Ignorant moron.
Send in the Clowns
Wars are started by ambitious men and women whose sense of humour plays no part in the serious business of running a country.
When a river running through your country has its source in another country, and they decide to reroute it, leaving your entire agricultural industry to waste away and hundreds of families to starve, just laugh it off!
What if, instead of sending professional statesmen, with their self-importance and deadly seriousness, to an international war summit, we were to send some of our top humorists? Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais, Ian Hislop and Larry David, for instance.
Can you imagine this gathering of diplomats contriving to start a war?
They wouldn't be able to, no matter how hard they tried. Their sense of humour forbids it.
I, for one, have no difficulty believing Ricky Gervais to be capable of declaring war on just about anyone. And if I were a diplomat forced to negotiate with Sacha Baron Cohen, I know I'd go out of my way to start that war myself.
When people declare war on others, they believe themselves to be just.
They believe that God is on their side.
God knows, they are insane.
Is it really possible to be this ignorant of international politics? This trite nonsense may be true for the one war in particular we're all thinking of, but come on.
A Building for Peace
If instead of showing strength by spending billions on weapons of war, the West was to build a mosque on Ground Zero, it would be a remarkable symbol of our understanding of the Islamic point of view.
It would be a major step towards world peace.
World peace under a global caliphate.
But at least people would believe in God.
The picture is the New York skyline with a huge mosque crudely drawn in the background. I can't imagine too many people on either side of this who wouldn't be offended by it.
The Fear of God
Often, ordinary people don't think they understand philosophy.
They need simple rules of life.
This is where the Church comes in.
It gets the people to observe society's rules by putting the fear of God into them.
So close again.
You can believe in God without being religious
No, you fucking can't.
Believing in God does not make you a religious person.
Yes, it fucking does. That's the definition.
A religious person is quite different.
A religious person is someone who believes in a Church, and (religiously) performs the rites and ceremonies laid down by their Church.
And if we use our own definitions for everything, pigs can fly!
This is just more bullshit intended to bring people who are disillusioned with organised religion back into the flock before they get their hands on a copy of The God Delusion. It's sad and transparent.
Why Do People Join Cults?
New religions start up daily.
Why?
Because people are endlessly looking for solutions to life's problems, and the old religions seem out of touch.
Spiritual businessmen identify these people and serve them what they are looking for. These salesmen may be charlatans but they have the charm, drive and ambition necessary to succeed.
How else would you get people to join a sect that worships a visitor from outer space or a drunken scoundrel pretending to have found scriptures written on golden plates?
This all sounds a bit far-fetched, but for many millions it seems to work.
Those silly Scientologists and Mormons! How could anyone believe something so absurd?
They're nothing like use ordinary religious folks, though, who know the Lord God was born from a virgin two thousand years ago and died on the cross to forgive all of humanity the sin of eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge he (or rather, his father, a different aspect of the threefold God who is one) placed in the Garden of Eden, which he made just for the first man (though of course it was really the fault of the woman made from a rib of that man who was talked into it by a talking snake, now condemned to slither on its belly for all its days, even though that particular snake was actually an avatar of the fallen angel Lucifer, who tried to lead the angels in a revolt against God, and didn't really have anything to do with snakes in general).
Paying for God
Many religions or cults require you to pay money to their organization.
This is an important part of the hook.
If you pay for a service, you expect to get your money's worth.
If what you are getting is free, you don't make such big demands of it.
The Churches that extract the most get the most commitment.
So the more you pay, the more zealous you become.
If your local church charged a fiver on the door, they would get a bigger and more committed congregation.
You would also get a better service!
I hate when stupid people try their hand at market economics.
My Goodness
Some of the best, the nicest and most decent people I know are religious.
They are good because they spend their lives trying to be good.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the only people he knows are religious.
And all of those people hating people in the name of God, why, those aren't real religious people.
A Cool Religion
Islamic people go to the mosque five times a day. This may seem a little over the top to a non-Muslim.
But the ritual is rooted in something very simple:
The draining heat of the sun.
Mohammed knew that for a peasant working the hot fields, prayer would be a welcome relief:
- As a break.
- To wash yourself, especially your feet, for cleanliness and coolness.
- To have a drink of water (alcohol is not on the menu).
- To have a chat.
- To have an audience with God.
This is a civilized way for anybody to conduct their lives.
Hate to break it to you, but all three Abrahamic religions originated in the Middle East, and so did a whole bunch of other ones. Islam is the only one requiring that level of devotion, and for the most part it's only required it since the invention of air conditioning.
I have seen men and women in remote Turkish country villages who were beautiful, not for their physical attributes but for their serenity and glow of innocence that usually only children have.
This line is creepy as fuck. It also matches descriptions of people with Down's syndrome, or some varieties of mental illness.
The Church Today
One hundred years ago or less, people went to church, where they were told how to conduct their lives.
Today we watch television; it is our new life guru.
Where every house once had a Bible, there is now a television.
For many of us in the Western world, life is good, at least in terms of basics.
We have plenty of food, money for luxuries, access to information and enough time to enjoy ourself.
We don't feel the need for the church as a social centre anymore.
We have a new religion.
Consumerism.
Supermarkets are the new cathedrals.
Hurf durf shut the fuck up.
I am going to die soon
And now we come to the real reason for this bullshit. Paul Arden did die shortly after this book was published, of a heart attack at age 67. I don't know if this desperate grab at wanting to believe is motivated by a sense of his coming death, but 67 seems a bit young to be going senile, so it's a fair guess.
Until very recently, I had blind faith in a God who gave order to all things. I took a lot of comfort from that.
Recently, I had Darwin dumped on me with such clarity that it has shaken my belief to its foundations.
It's very disquieting not to believe anything.
God help me.
This is hilarious coming from a douchebag who just a few pages ago had the audacity to ask if you dared not to believe. He obviously didn't, and rather than confront reality, he decided to wrap himself in feel-good nonsense (and write this book to convince himself).
I wonder how it might have gone had his knowledge of atheists not been a commie-fearing mess of backward stereotypes.
The God Free Church?
Atheism denies the existence of any suprahuman being. All living creatures are the result of a chance coming together of gases, liquids and solids.
According to the atheist, all notions of God are fictional. He is a mere fantasy, living far beyond the scope of rational thinking.
But isn't a firm belief in the non-existence of a God a religion in itself?
The thing I said about being an ignorant douchenozzle still stands.
Demanding evidence for beliefs doesn't make atheism a religion; it makes it the antithesis of religion. It is a religion in the same sense not collecting stamps is a hobby, or bald is a hair color.
The bit about the chance coming together of gases, liquids, and solids suggests that the clarity with which he had Darwin ``dumped on him'' was no match for old-fashioned willful ignorance.
After Life
People are scared of the dark because they don't know what's there.
As soon as they put the light on, they can see and feel safe.
We are all scared of dying, because we are afraid of the unknown.
To ease our fear of the dark, we invent explanations for the afterlife such as heaven and hell and reincarnation.
Like the light we switch on to feel safe.
Or like imagining you switched on the light, at least. Fear is not a valid epistemology.
These pages are very black, with the title being on the second of two black pages, the text on the fourth, and the fifth having a white outline of a hand reaching for a white outline of a light switch. It's a simple appeal to emotion, but apparently Arden doesn't realise that doesn't make it a legitimate argument.
It was reported that God said 'Let there be light'
The sun was made by God.
Religion is a light bulb, created by man to help him to see in the dark.
Arden's cognitive dissonance laid bare. The only way you can square these two sentences is if, like Arden, you make up your own definition of religion.
Reincarnation
Everyone has thoughts on what will happen when they die.
Yet no one has ever come back to tell the tale.
Some say that if you behave well in this life you get a better deal in the next.
Buddhism is based on this thinking.
Probably the most popular theory is the scientific one.
We are composed of matter, and when we die, that matter is simply rearranged in a different form.
I don't know why he keeps talking about Buddhism when it's abundantly clear he doesn't actually know anything about it. Maybe it's the only non-Abrahamic religion he could remember the name of. He certainly seems averse to looking stuff up.
Incidentally, the picture for this is a stereotypical Frenchman, striped shirt and beret and everything, holding a snail. The caption reads:
You die.
You're buried and fertilize the plants.
The plants are eaten by snails.
Man eats the snails.
Now you are a Frenchman.
Voila!
I don't know if this is supposed to demonstrate Buddhism or the ``scientific theory''.
So, Is There a God?
Again with the black pages. The sad part is that he probably thinks he's made a pretty good case for the existence of God by now.
And if there is a God, where do you find him?
I found him… here
And then there's an arrow pointing down to a black ground beneath a red sky. Caption reads ``Petworth, West Sussex, England''.
We're almost done, fortunately.
Walking with an old friend and mentor, I asked him if he could explain God to me
Two black figures on the ground. The sky is a bit darker.
Look, he said, pointing at the sunset. What do you think made that?
One of them is pointing. :O
Do you think it's an accident?
Sky is darker.
Do you think it's a trick of the light?
Darker still.
Do you think it's a fluke?
Darker and darker.
If you do then say I believe in flukes
Almost black.
Evolution, fate, creation, fluke. You can call it what you like. They are all words we use to describe the same thing…
His old friend and mentor is as mush-brained as he is.
The existence of God
Evolution is just our name for the existence of God. Congratulations, this is the most ridiculous attempt at defining God outside of any scrutiny I've seen so far.
What exactly does evolution have to do with sunsets, again?
God is our name for the force behind creation
Note: incompatible with several of his earlier definitions of same.
That's what I believe
And that's why I call you mush-brained and ignorant.
I believe in God
Background is now black and starry.
Of course, we still don't have a coherent definition of what he considers God, so this line is meaningless.
But if you don't believe in God, this is the end
Only true believers get to read the acknowledgements.
According to Wikipedia, Paul Arden accepted that ``some'' would see the work as ``a bit of fluff'', but said that such critics had ``tunnel vision'' and that ``the tunnel goes right up their arse''. This is one reason I feel justified in calling him an ignorant douchenozzle rather than a cynic looking to ride Dawkins' coat-tails (except in the other direction) or even just a confused old man who might not actually be a bad person, but his publisher should really be ashamed of himself for exploiting a feeble-minded author to squeeze some pennies from feeble-minded readers.
This book is now the second one (after Paul Davies' The Goldilocks Enigma) I refuse to keep on my shelves, because it's not just ignorant, mush-brained, and hypocritical, it's nastily so.
