Brave New World – Aldous Huxley Reading??? Yes, I do have short infrequent slivers of time in my week for the occasional read. How many qualifiers can a person use to quantify their lack of reading time in one sentence? I may need a few more… The latest read was Brave New World by Aldous …
“I’m interested in how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal the hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath,” McCandless states on his webpage.
Despite its coverage of all the ways in which evolution can be demonstrated, Why Evolution is True provides a compact read of all the evidence for evolution. Only at the very last chapter does the author address creationism directly. Coyne suggests that anti-evolutionists do not oppose the idea of evolution solely, but rather reject the science because of the implications evolution has on the meaning of their personal religious beliefs. In short, evolution more than adequately explains how humans and our surroundings developed into what we are today. It leaves no gaps for a god to fill. To combat this rejection for the sake of religion, Coyne says: “Evolution is simply a theory about the processes and patterns of life’s diversification, not a grand philosophical scheme about the meaning of life. It can’t tell us what to do, our how we should behave.”(p. 225)
Hands down the most refreshing book I have read in years. “Last Chance to See” by Douglas Adams fits into the non fiction section with a toe in the humor that characterizes Adams’ most famous series: “The Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy“. Adams recounts his travels around the world in a last ditch attempt to …
Christopher Hitchen’s book The Missionary Position was published in 1995, right around the time when my 10 year old brain was being spoon fed Catholicism and my mother was telling me how saintly and wonderful Mother Teresa was. It is for this reason that I am now just able to read this revealing book on the hypocrisies and depravities of Mother Teresa. Having met Mother Teresa himself and tour her poor house in Calcutta, Hitchens offers a glimpse into the derisive nature of her work and her heavy hand in politics and money all over the globe.
Letter to A Christian Nation was the first of Sam Harris’ books that I picked up. Gathering assumptions from the title, I anticipated a book geared towards the religious infiltration into American politics. I found a bit of that mixed into Sam’s book, but even better I found his straightforward approach to tackling American fundamentalists brilliantly refreshing. Written in the first person,[amazon ASIN="978-0307278777"]Letter to a Christian Nation[/amazon] bluntly points out the hypocracies American fundamentalist Christians show in opposing Muslim fundamentalists. Before doing this, he compactly brings down every major dogma of Christianity, laying the ground work for the final punch at the end. He rightly suggests that in order to combat the religious nonsense that drives Muslim suicide attacks, American Christians need to turn that finger around and examine their own radical, exclusive belief system.
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