Anywho, one of the things that was put into my suggestion box was that I write more about the time I went clubbing. I’ll just give you a quick anecdote about the drunken adventures of my friend Elliott Egan and I shortly after the events of the post ‘Toilet’.
As you’ll know if you read it, he was very dangerously drunk, not safe to be left alone. But unfortunately he escaped from me and ran off to pee somewhere far away. As I watched him run away I couldn’t help but worry that he’d jump down the twenty to thirty foot drop a little further along and not have somebody to restrain him. Luckily, he didn’t jump over and was able to find a secluded area to urinate, though on the downside he did vomit over the wall, down to where some people were happily sitting and enjoying the night. But to look on the bright side again, the vomit didn’t land on them, it only landed near them, so they could just have moved.
When he finally got back to me he said “I’m just going to head down there to that burger stand and get a burger!” he ran off again. About half an hour later I looked around the corner to see this burger stand, my logic being that he’d been gone half an hour and I highly doubted that it would have many customers are 2:30 a.m. Unfortunately, around the corner there was no burger stand in site, which was somewhat alarming considering the state he was in. I mentioned it to a few people; nobody seemed to know of any burger stand, until finally somebody told me that there was one not that far away. (Incidentally, while I was asking people about it I met two people. One of whom kept talking about paedophiles.)
Eventually, Egan returned, holding a bag with a burger in it. However, for Egan there was some confusion as to the contents of the bag as he kept insisting that it was a bag of chips, while everybody else could see that it was a bag with a burger in it. Egan then tried to eat it as if it were a bag of chips, resulting in the burger falling, totally uneaten, to the floor. Egan then decided to fulfil another desire of his and went to talk to some females and as you can tell from this entry, his drunken seduction skills didn’t bring him much success. But I won’t go into details… At least not in this post.
The same suggestion that asked me to write more about the time I went to the clubs also asked me whether I would go again. To answer the question I would say that I will go again, it’s good thing to do to collect stories for my blog and it is nice to get to socialise with all the people who go (even if I don’t particularly like meeting up in big crowds.)
Before reading this book, I’d read a lot of complaints about it saying that Richard Dawkins writes in an arrogant and offensive kind of way. In fact, after seeing a couple of documentaries by him, I kind of expected the same thing. But I have to say that I really don’t think this is true, despite the fact that he even seems to think that it is, as he often seems to be almost apologetic and justifying everything that he says. So if you’ve heard that this is a rather arrogant preachy book, you’ve heard wrong, and you should give this a chance.
While the title of the book is ‘The God Delusion’ Dawkins doesn’t actually argue against the existence of God all that much, he uses the ‘But who made God?” argument a few times, but generally he seems to be arguing against religions, rather than God. Indeed, he actually only says that there is ‘almost certainly’ no God, and never makes arrogant claims that suggest he actually knows.
But what he does argue against a lot is both religion and creationism. He argues, quite well in my opinion, that religious thinking is very bad for science as it stops people questioning and keeps them content with faith, and also thinks it immoral that children are indoctrinated into the same religion as their parents when, he says, a child cannot really understand religions and should be allowed to make the decision at an older point in their life (which is also very convincing). He also talks about the extent to which atheists suffer prejudice in America, which is actually pretty surprising once you read it. Plus, as a kind of little bonus, he goes into the crazy world of quantum mechanics at the end.
So, on the whole, this book is fairly argued and well written. There are several funny little jokes and anecdotes that he slips in every now and then and he makes several pop culture references which make it a little more enjoyable. The downside is that, as Richard Dawkins is a biologist, the tone becomes a little too scientific and hard to understand when he is talking about evolution, and, as I said before, the book does not really fully fulfil its task; he seems to argue well against religion and creationism but not so well against the idea of God itself. So on the whole, I’d rate this book as an 8/10.
EDIT: Dalfino has now given up on his blog and deleted it…