A review by maddandroid
Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide by Richard Dawkins

5.0

5 stars
If you want to decide for yourself if what you were taught about religion were true, I’d highly recommend this book along with Stephen Hawkings’ “Brief Answers to the Big Questions” Here Dawkins goes through the biology of evolution, Hawkins goes through the cosmology of why a god is unnecessary.
Unfortunately I think it will be largely ignored, I think it’s very hard to persuade superstitious people to have the courage to give up their superstitions, especially today when so many unscientific theories abound both on the internet and in politics. My favorite chapters are the first part of the book where he takes on the bible, philosophy and how myths start.

Eye-witnesses photographed what they thought was the face of Satan in the smoky dust clouds hanging over New York that day.

We want to see patterns, it’s how we order the world, even when there really is no pattern to see.

I love the Mark Twain quotes

Mormonism is another relatively recent cult which, unlike the John Frum or cargo cults, or the ‘Elvis is Risen’ cult, has spread all over the world and become rich and powerful. The founder was a man from New York State called Joseph Smith. He claimed that in 1823 an angel called Moroni told him where to dig up some golden plates which had ancient writing on them. Smith said he did so, and translated the writing from an old Egyptian language into English. He did this with the aid of a magic stone in a magic hat. When he looked in the hat, the stone revealed to him the meaning of the words. He published his English ‘translation’ in 1830. Weirdly, the English was not the English of his own time but the English of more than two centuries earlier, the English of the King James Bible. Mark Twain joked that if you cut out every repetition of ‘It came to pass’, the Book of Mormon would shrink to a pamphlet.

Mark Twain is supposed to have said: ‘A lie can spread half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.’ And not only malicious lies, but good stories that aren’t true but are amusing and fun to recount, especially if you were told them in good faith and don’t positively know they’re untrue. Or stories that, if not amusing, are spookily uncanny – another reason why so many are passed on.

Like so many lies spread that through social media and news sources that offer no real facts only opinion.