“GOD” - Richard Dawkins’ Foreward + Introduction

The Book

Dan Barker

Hot off the presses: GOD is here! No, not figuratively (I mean, duh, he is everywhere, right Janica?) GOD is the 2016 release by Dan Barker (an Evangelical preacher before his conversion to Atheism in 1984) that carries the intentionally provocative sub-title “The Most Unpleasant Character In All Fiction.” When I first ordered the book, browsing among the other 2016 releases (I really like that phrase for some reason), I failed to see this under-heading, & so was expecting this volume to be a citation-&-quote packed book of the kind Bart Ehrman & Elaine Pagels have been churning out (that choice of language is not fair to them, however, because somber crafting describes much more accurately the type of activity these two scholars engage in) since the 1970’s. Instead, the sub-title reveals that GOD is transparent in authorial intent -- This is going to be a polemic. Now, of course, that does not mean it has to be useless for the serious reader, nor does a polemic have to be immediately discarded for fear of inaccuracy. Polemics or pieces of propagandistic literature can be factual & educational while, at the same time, advancing their narrow ideological goals. For every Mein Kampf there is Empire Of Illusion, masterfully written screeds capable of emotive movement, drawing the broad stroke of contemporary situations while also providing factual scenarios that bring depth to the patina of decay painted by their authors.


Soooo, this is going to be a polemic treatment, framing God (or, more accurately Yahweh) as “the most unpleasant” fictional character possibly devised. Behind the provocative title are ideological assumptions -- we go into this book knowing that the authors (for really it is a collaborative project between famous Movement Atheist Richard Dawkins & Barker the former preacher, who is something of his protege) posit that they know that this Yahweh-God is a fictive being. Note that this is the same certitude expressed by the clerics, for it should ring familiar to the audience. I have felt for some time that Movement Atheists (known as ‘new atheists’ in some works, including this one) are the other side of the fundamentalist coin, that they posit unmediated access to the answers to Reality much as the Christian or Muslim does. The difference is that their ideology is ‘science,’ or some crude, degenerated form of it, and that it is known rather than believed.


That being said, I am going into this book viewing it as firmly within the canon of the ‘new atheists’. We will see if my expectations are tenable as the book reveals itself to me. I have thusfar read the Introduction & the Foreword. Before that, however, I looked to the inflated praise that accompany such books, present on the dust jacket flaps & back. Some intriguing things to be found there-


GOD exposes “The moral depravity of the bibilical god”


GOD is an “unrelenting deconstruction of the bible”


“After reading Barker’s book...the monstrosity of God is undeniable”


“A must read for any serious student of the bible”

Yahweh rendered, mostly likely accurately

Some hefty praise indeed. As I do consider myself a ‘serious student of the bible’ (really more of Christian exegesis, but ‘details-details’) I am looking forward to seeing what this book has to offer. I am hoping that it is more than the sub-title & celebrity-status of the co-author seem to suggest.

According to the dust jacket “former ordained minister & current atheist” Dan Barker “proves that Dawkins was right” about Yahweh/God -- That of all fictional beings, this one is the worst. I’m sure for their ideological crowd this seems like a ‘gotcha!’ Kind of point against ‘the other side’, but the more that particular claim is isolated, the less important it seems to be. Who really cares who the ‘most evil’ fictional character is? I mean, perhaps Literature students….Also, those of us who study religious people & how religion is practiced know that what texts say is less important than how people interpret the text & why it is found relevant to individuals. Simply put, much of people’s religion is their own -- what they make of their particular doctrines, scripts, & characters etc... It is about as much about culture as it is scriptural quotation. So all of this is sort of a so what, but as the authors rightly point out, actually reading the bible with fresh, open eyes can be liberatory for a person of a certain situation.

Moving forward, the organization of GOD is structured rather pedagogically (perhaps the authors earnestly intended it is a teaching tool for fundamentalists seeking to leave religion)--

“In part 1, Barker begins each chapter with his own commentary on one or two biblical stories that Barker & Dawkins have chosen to illustrate a characteristic on the list”

Comedian Julia Sweeney foreworded Barker's previous book The Good Atheist

Barker, whose previous book featured a foreword by television star Julia Sweeney, chooses his mentor (& apparent inspiration for this book) Richard Dawkins to foreword GOD. ‘Really who else would it have been?’ Should have replaced this particular chapter heading, as we learn that GOD was not only inspired by Dawkins, but by a single sentence the ‘master’ wrote. Jesus (literally). Btw, the ‘dedication’ of this book reads-

“Dedicated to the memory of Patricia Ruth Barker, who was infinitely nicer than God”

We get it. Why does this book have to hit us over the head with its thesis numerous times before we even have a chance to turn to page 1??

In the Dawkins Foreword, after a rather disingenous & outright misleading calculation on the cost of ‘Gideon Bibles’, we are presented with some basic claims of Dawkins-Barker. With a shred of one of the opening sentences -- “...a cursory look at the Bible should be enough to convince a reasonable person…” -- we can see bold-face propaganda techniques being employed, reinforcing the idea of GOD as an anti-Yahweh propaganda-polemical text. The implication delivered by the firebrand-extraordinaire Dawkins is that if one disagrees with the assertion that the Bible (as it stands today) is a horrible demonstration of ‘the love of God’, than that person is not employing reason. Interesting that these authors did not consider that there are multiple reasonings so that there should be no one reason. Or perhaps they did consider it. And threw it out because it made for a less coherent position-argument.

Time & time again in both the foreword & the introduction, Dawkins-Barker push against the claim that Dawkins & his claims are strident. It is this particular criticism that must rankle Dawkins the most because it is repeated over-and-over in the relatively-short Foreword, & because it is probably true. Reasons to believe Dawkins is strident are apparent; one does not need to look far, for on VIII of this very book we find this sentence-

Catherine Blackwell as male

“If you happen to be a member of the Gideons, I challenge you to read Dan Barker’s book & then ask yourself why you don’t instantly resign”

If that is not strident than I must be unfamiliar with the true meaning of the term. Lol. From here Dawkins proceeds to slam the Gideons (‘nobody reads their bibles’) & then explains how this book has its origins in a Dawkins conception of how best to represent his information with scripture quotations. Finding the project expanding beyond his comfortable reach, Dawkins tasked protege Barker with fleshing-out the argument that Yahweh is the most evil of fictions (not because it is fictive, but because of the content of that fiction). After explaining “Dan Barker’s book had its origin...in a single sentence of my own The God Delusion”, (gag me with a spoon) he says that the assertion of Yahweh as the ‘most evil fiction’ may lead people to believe he is strident, but he assures the reader that the rest of his work is certainly not strident. Of his work & central assertion of The God Delusion he writes:

“From the day I wrote it, I always knew that every one of my list of nineteen nasty attributes could be fully substantiated in the bible, but I didn’t know quite how richly & thoroughly every one of them could be documented”

Could this man be any more strident? Dawkins assures the reader of the credibility of Barker to his claims of familiarity with the material: He was a preacher after all & “thrust it in the face of countless victims of the doorstepping pastor he once was” as Dawkins puts it.

We finally get to a fact 75% of the way through the foreword, as Dawkins claims “Even today, more than 40% of American think the world began exactly in the way Genesis describes, less than 10,000 years ago”. Bemusing, & most likely true, though I haven’t chased this particular statistic with any furor. I just assume it to be true because it jives with not only my experience of the United States of America (& Bibleville, where I currently live), but also because I have heard some stats that sound vaguely similar in the past. If true, it is certainly something that 40% of Americans really believe that all of humanity stemmed from one man & one woman, that the woman corrupted the man, that woman is responsible for pain & earthly suffering, for our fall from ‘paradise’, & that ‘knowledge’ itself is thus an enemy, zoologized as the snake: literal evil. This should bring us pause. Knowledge is the enemy. Satan is knowledge. Woman is his accomplice, & it is through her power that he corrupted human-kind. Is this not the message of fundamentalist Christianity?

Dawkins finishes his foreword with a complete lie:

“We have all become acculturated to the idea that criticising religion is somehow not done, it’s bad taste, you just don’t do it”

Dawkins. Photoshopped but lol.

This is coming from a man who has literally built his career upon withering critique of religion. He has become a celebrity & media star, a leader in a movement ascendant upon his attack on religion. Is he literally trying to say that what he is doing is going against the grain, because for the movement Atheists who consume the ‘red-meat’ he produces, it is hardly extraordinary. At this point is Dawkins really doing anything special? I wouldn’t say that his entire career has been unspectacular (not at all), but there is really nothing earth-shattering about a withering critique of Christianity based on comparing the word of Christians with the deeds of Christians. Enlightenment-era anti-clerical polemicists were doing this in the 1700’s. Pagan authors were doing so in 100CE, or even earlier than that. Dawkins thinks that he & his fellow ‘new atheists’ are special-- maybe only if one is operating from a Christian-based worldview are these claims ‘shattering’ to anything. To everyone else, it is old news, and worse, polemically-tinted old news. The potential of this material to be used as grist for a disingenuous ideological attack is real. Much like the genre of outrage operating in talk radio identified by media scholar Sarah Sobieraj, this type of content on the pages of GOD does the same thing for ‘new atheists’ -- advancing old claims, ‘scoring points’, general tomfoolery, intellectually dishonest aspersions, & the use of emotion rather than the ‘reason’ they speak of in such reverent terms. One wonders, is reason really their ‘north star’ or is it something else? & What is that something?

Me & GOD

Perhaps I will find out in the body of GOD. Problematizing aside, this book has been entertaining & enjoyable thusfar & I anticipate reading it further. If nothing else, I am predicting that it will be a brief glimpse into a political ‘new atheist’ worldview with perhaps some facts, some scripture quotes, & connections betwixt the two.

& so that is what I will expect.