Claire Conger

I happened to be halfway through Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion when I went to a dinner party. I was sitting happily on a bench in some cool people’s garden and getting pine sap on my $98 silk skirt, while trying to make conversation like I know what I’m saying. I offered “I think people who believe in God are idiots.”

Oops! The host’s mother is Italian and she’s probably a devout Catholic! (If I can do anything well, it’s stick my size 8 in my mouth!)

I continued quickly with “My mother doesn’t believe in God. She wishes there were someone up there watching out for her, but she doesn’t see why she’d be so important.”

My host repeated my statement about my mother. He was being both polite and thoughtful.

A guest retorted, “Then where would be your moral compass, if you do not believe in God?”

I replied that I did not need a theologian to tell me what to think.

But that was not a very good response on my part as any reader of Dawkins would know.

Dawkins makes the very logical point that people do not derive their morality from their Bibles. They pick and choose the parts of their Bibles that they like and say that’s how a person should behave. The very act of picking and choosing from a source negates that source being the ultimate answer.

Anyone who’s actually read the Bible should be able to reason that the father God Abraham, who set his own son on a funeral pyre (page 242), and other notables such as Lot, who gave his daughters to be gang raped to appease an enemy (page 240), would in today’s morality be in jail for child endangerment.

So, uh, my morality should come from religion? Which one, pray tell?

The God Delusion is good reading, and, although I had no real need to consider it, I found it interesting enough to read every word. I learned quite a bit.

For example, I did not know that our founding fathers were anti-religious.

Wrote Jefferson: “To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings.” and “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” (italics Jefferson’s I believe; page 42-43)

And from a treaty with Tripoli drafted under George Washington and signed by John Adams in 1797 “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion . . .” (page 40).

They seem to leave this out of our text books.

As for my conversation at the dinner party? Luckily the guest changed the subject after I rejected any need of religion for morality, and I got the pine sap out of my skirt using Desert Essence Thoroughly Clean Face Wash, which contains tea tree oil.

By the way, the only thing I didn’t like in Dawkin’s The God Delusion is his use of the burka as a metaphor for our limited range of sight, as if the women wearing them are limited. Who knows what they see.