Interim friend and contributor Harley Price has posted part two of his series, “The Atheist Delusion: How the Religion of Progressive Thinking Poisons Everything.” We noted the publication of part one last week.
Price packs more into a paragraph than either Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens can in an entire chapter:
In a chapter of twenty-plus pages, Dawkins flogs himself through the Old Testament in search of moral anachronisms, exhaustively re-telling the patriarchal narratives for the benefit of what he assumes is a scripturally illiterate readership, and coaching his readers along the way as to when they should be properly horrified (“Yes, you read correctly”[!]). Since Abraham is the founding father of three religions, surely, Dawkins reasons, he ought to be “a role model”. But when he went to Egypt to “tough out a famine”, he expediently “passed off” his wife as his sister. Sarah thus entered Pharaoh’s harem and Abraham consequently “became rich”, but God disapproved of “this cosy arrangement, and sent plagues on [sic] Pharaoh and his house (why not on Abraham?)”. Angry that Abraham had deceived him about Sarah, Pharaoh “then handed her back to Abraham and kicked them both out of Egypt”. “Weirdly”, Dawkins adds, “it seems that the couple later tried to pull the same stunt again”. After narrating the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in his usual patronizing detail and puerile style, Dawkins accuses God of “bullying” and Abraham of “child abuse” (one of the leitmotives of the contemporary attack on religion), and quips that Abraham’s is “the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: ‘I was only obeying orders’ “. Later when discussing the “barking mad” Christian doctrine of the Redemption (“If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed?…Who is God trying to impress?”), Dawkins says that the Crucifixion is even more “sado-masochistic” than the story of “Abraham setting out to barbecue Isaac”. Our author animadverts sarcastically upon the childishness of “faith-heads”, as he calls them, but that unfortunate locution, along with “barbecue”, “tough out”, “suck up to God”, and other similarly infantile usages leap with such alacrity to his lips as to indicate a mind permanently stuck in adolescence. Notwithstanding the portrait on the dust-jacket of a man greying around the temples, I am often moved to wonder, by the cool colloquialism of these biblical paraphrases, whether The God Delusion was ghost-written by a ten-year-old.
