Metal Reviews

I loved The Hobbit, but whenever I go to read The Fellowship of the Ring I can never get into it. Recently, I tried again since I figured my reading skills have matured since the last time I tried (which they have), but I read like 150 pages into it and they're not even out of the damn Shire. I gave up and turned to more exciting reading...

Like A Storm of Swords. Holy. Fucking. Shit. Martin is the least pussy author I've ever read...totally not afraid to make major plot turns and kill off major characters. This seriously contends for my favorite book ever.

Also read "A Place to Stand" by Jimmy Santiago Baca for summer reading. Extremely interesting autobiography about a guy who was an illiterate at 21 (and doing a 5 year prison sentence) but became a great poet.

Yeah Tolkien requires a looooooooot of patience.

I assume you've reached a certain wedding... Oh man, I love that book. It is my favourite book of all time.

bah, over 200 pages in and Quicksilver is going nowhere. i'm returning it and using the refund to buy A Clash of Kings which i'm hoping has arrived by now!

Just started 2001 - A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke. Pretty good so far, surprising I didn't get to it earlier. Also reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, so far, so great.

I got bored halfway in The God Delusion. It's like a collection of every atheist argument I've heard gathered in a book. Tell me something I don't know.

Not only that, but its just arrogant atheist blather. Dawkin's early books are based on science and are informative; the God Delusion is a rant that gives us atheists a bad name.

So far, I'm finding it hard to see why certain atheists don't like it. He's bang-on about the criticism of religions bit, and as far as my puny scientific knowledge can tell, about the science.

Steven Erikson - Gardens of The Moon - Book 1 of A Tale of The Malazan Book of The Fallen

It's hard not to become arrogant when you don't take religion seriously. It's like arguing that unicorns don't exist for Dawkins.

Being that fanatical about atheism makes it a bit closer to religion. What he needs to get is that people have faith and just that. Nothing more. You can't change their opinions, not even with empirical evidence because they don't believe in it for being completely accurate and true, they just believe it because they feel the need to.

This book won't help any atheist because he already doesn't believe, won't make anyone lose their faith because they don't care about the scientific side of things in the first place. That makes the book rather pointless.

gonna re-read the last HP to et all the details now i think...then i will re-read the lord of the rings, which is my ultimate favourite..

Being that fanatical about atheism is trying to push people into questioning their beliefs or solidifying their lack of. Nowadays being an athiest is a leap of faith with people associating atheism with Stalin and immorality. Dawkins created a book to solidify athiests in their lack of beliefs.

If anything it helps Christians because if they can look past his arguments, then they can solidify their beliefs (ie: ignorance)

Balls. People can quite easily lose their faith if they're made to see how ridiculous it is. You did. I did. This 'ah, but being passionate about it makes you as bad as them!' crap is just that, crap. Some believe because they've lost their family, others don't for exactly the same reason. You can't generalise.

If anyone's being ignorant, it's not Dawkins. You're assuming that because Christians (and others) have been bought up since birth to believe in whatever crock of shit is relevant, they lack the mental power to overcome that? Blimey, talk about bigoted.

I'm not saying they can't overcome it, but the general opinion is that Dawkins' arguments aren't phasing people's faith enough to have them give up on religion. They may give up on their beliefs but it isn't going to be solely because of this book.

When did I say Dawkins was being ignorant? To me, he has hit the nail on the head. I was actually saying their beliefs are ignorant.

For an example of my statement, a guy I was in a class with last quarter saw that I was reading it and he said that he liked the book after he read it because it showed that their truly are skeptics and that prophecy was being fulfilled when it said that skeptics and doubters will be present before the end times.

I've told a lot of the stuff in Dawkins' book long ago to religious friends and almost all of them had the same look on it. I've given up.

Let's face it, 8 times out of 10 an atheist is somebody who isn't brought up in a strictly religious family. People who have been raised religious, if not with a pretty good sense of logic, will frown upon every well crafted perfectly worded argument you make and tell you you're going to hell. The hell if they'll lose their faith with a book. They've built a whole way of life based on pure speculation, do you think a book will really make them realize anything. I sadly have no such hope about humanity anymore.

I can certainly see where you're both coming from (I think we've all experienced uber-religious atmospheres of various types) but don't give up on people yet. Religious types are dwindling, with the ultra-religious being steadily pushed into a corner, others assimilating bit by bit. As the man said, one day people will look back on today's religions the way we look back at the Greek gods - give it time, this too will pass, world keeps turning etc.

I think Dawkins wanted The God Delusion to help individuals, as someone said, rather than be a 'bible' to convert with. In these terms, it's pretty untouchable. Depending on your frame of mind though, you can argue with anything.

I thought that book was excellent. Not my favorite book ever by any means, but an amazing story, especially when you consider that it came out before we landed on the moon. The ending presents a really interesting concept of God, and that's what really made it a great book for me.



Yeah, I finished the book...and had when I posted that. Amazing book..

Right now, I'm starting "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula K. Leguin. Anyone read this? Apparently, the Earthsea series is a fantasy classic although I'd never heard of it until I bought it.

...also going to be reading this book called Flight by Sherman Alexie for summer reading. Don't know what to think about that.

Personally I'm on Kathy's side that The God Delusion is essentially preaching to the choir and that any religious person reading it will look on it in the same way that I look on Bill O'Reilly. All it's really doing is pushing the extermes of the argument further apart and that doesn't really accomplish much except more pointless arguments, which is the problem with religion in the first place