Book 2 Book

I finished my first hefty book for the year being 'Persian Fire' an unbiased view of the lead up and fallout of the Battle of Thermopylae.
So on wednesday I headed into Borders and I did a very Christian thing ironically, I went in and bought a book about religion, more so I bought a book that already agreed with what I believed and that in itself was a very Christianlike thing to do.
I bought a book called 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins a book that contains the following too true passage:

Of course dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature (whether by evolution or design). Among the more efective immunological devices is a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely a work of Satan

out of context it seems classic Atheist arrogance but by far this is what has frustrated me most thoroughly every time the 'faith' debate rears its ugly head.
That is the persistence of religion to base its continued validity on simply suppressing reality, or at the very least not responding and not acknowledging the most compelling arguements against its position.
Its all together childish this response. When I am argumentatively cornered my favorite tactic is to change my stance and use circular logic so I am immediately on the winning side and yes this infuriates people but at least in its unsportingness I can admit that I am wrong to the most important person - my self.
The fact is there are a list of common arguements as to why religious entities don't exist particularly the most common face off between Christian vs. Atheism it looks something like this:

Dinosaurs
The Mutual Exclusiveness of other religions (Islam vs Judaism vs Christianity)
A complete abscence of tangible evidence
Evolution
The world is round
The Big Bang
Jesus trained in India

which I'm starting to get to the obscure end of the spectrum but frankly my point is its all together easy to go out and find evidence that a religion is full of shite. Strong words but it remains something quite a strong experience. Despite all the energies and efforts of thousands of years of developments it takes me roughly 20 minutes in a bookstore, park or shopping centre to find yet another big hole in the Lord Creators sky.
This book finally (it may not be the first) is simply a least of the arguements for and against the existence of a God, laid out in an ordered manner and argued intelligently by someone admittedly more intelligent than me.
Infact if you check out Mr John's latest blog post for the last couple of months you'll find his response to Pascal's wager.
This book covers Pascals wager too but I'm not up to it yet.
What I will say is that John and I are similar in our approach to the subject of morality yet possibly different I don't know, it is to say that I think that I approach the question on similar lines to John.
But let me elaborate on the incident that caused me to cross the line, the straw if you will that broke the camel's back.
I infact wrote about it before but cant be bothered tracking it down.
I was sitting on a bench in Bourke St. I'd just bought a footlong meatball sub. At the time my dear departed ipod was still functioning and I was listening to it. I even had my reflective aviators on, that give my outlook that dead soulless feel.
It was a beautiful day the sun was shining, the trees were still green.
My eyes, ears, mouth and to some extent nose were all occupied.
I can't imagine how I could communicate more that I am not in the mood for communication yet this signal failed to register on an elderly woman who walked up to me.
I forget what exactly she said straight up, probably small talk but she started saying 'How do we know God exists? we look at this tree and of course we know that god exists...' blah blah blah.
So for me that was probably it right there. You interrupt me, harmless to anyone and everyone (except for maybe the kids from the third world they process into meatballs) and you come and make not just a leap in faith but a leap in logic.
What it boils down to is this compelling arguement.

There is a tree therefore God exists
Because God exists we can assume the tree is proof of the absolute nature of his moral code

First up I don't find a tree a devine miracle. it's a tree, it's a self replicating carbon based protein just like me, its simple it doesn't take a god to create and sculpt every tree the natural world is no evidence for a moral law.
At the very least it is as compelling evidence for any creation myth out there whether it's shintoism, Greco/Roman paganism, Hinduism, Jainism, Mormonism, Dream Time, Heaven's Gate Cult. In that because something exists, we can assume someone created it.
Now this was months before the flash in the pan that was Intelligent design, I've seen a couple of documentaries so far on what may represent the dumbest manouvre by any group so powerful for so long ever.
It was an unprovocked attack on science, intelligent design is at best a poor theory, it has almost no scientific support the two major arguements for it irreducible complexity and mathematical probability have both been entirely discredited.

I'm getting ahead of myelf, similar to John's wager I had come to the epiphany that it simply didn't matter if God existed or not, because the moral code lead me to dislike the prospect of membership to any religion, what John calls the Whiney God. So I ruled on the side of Atheism (because of the compelling reasons to do so) but otherwise felt that the existence of organised religion was something I didn't really have to worry about myself.
We could all live in peaceful coexistance.
But what seems to have become suddenly fashionable is not this view, due in large to intelligent designs attack on science. The significance may be lost on people but basically this was an attempt to take a legitimate educational system and teach it something that was not science, as science.
It was an attack on science itself.

Because I was reading about the persian attempt to conquer Greece, a backwater country with a fledgling system called democracy. The Persian Emporer had conquered effectively most of Asia and had virtually unlimited resources. Greece by contrast where peasents farming sheep and fishing in the sea.
With no particular reason but I wish to assert his dominance (grounded in belief) Xerxes tried to invade, grossly overstretched himself, suffered some humiliating defeats and was repelled from Greece.
Hence hencely unprovoked Persia may have been able to leave the greeks cowering in fear, building and consolidating his own empire and Greece would never have found a reason to unite and thus spread democracy and eventually attack the edges of the Persian empire.
I suspect intelligent design may be a similar stupid and unprovoked attack that may have pushed and fragmented atheist community to unite.??

I guess it comes back to Basil though from my brief visit to Common: All communities find methods of conscious and subconscious inclusion and exclusion and athiests are no different from other religions.
I realise an Atheist that says 'my way is the only way' is just as aggressive as an evangelical christian (though athiests are yet to burn 'heritics' in the name of no god) but I will make instead my own wager:

It is more likely for an Athiest to have a clear sense of right and wrong and behave according to their values, than a believer.

That's the way I'll bet from now on.