Monday, December 19, 2011

God, No! Signs You May Already Be An Atheist and Other Magical Tales - Penn Jillette

Part manifesto, part autobiography and part joke, the uneven quality in this book can be attributed to it not knowing exactly what it wants to be. Zooming out of the gate, Jillette lays out what it means to be an atheist (All you have to be able to say is "I don't know") and recalls a story about eating bacon with Hasidic Jews. His attempt to match the Ten Commandments with his own has some wings (even if Hitchens did it better) but it sags in the middle, bogged down in personal anecdotes about having sex while scuba diving and stripping naked on the vomit comet. It picks up again at the end, with Jillette offering atheism as the only hope against terrorism, that faith is the enemy that rational people must overcome:

"Being religious means being okay with believing in things without evidence... Once you've condoned faith in general, you've condoned any crazy shit done because of faith."



 

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