This month, my literary attentions returned to religion. Religion vexes me. The notion of a personal God — of God as a personality with incentive plans for goodness — is patently ridiculous to me, and yet it remains a notion ardently subscribed to by an overwhelming majority of humanity. Religion sits atop nationalism and ideology in my unholy trinity of dogmatism — breeding grounds for arrogant intolerance, boosted by insider-outsider group selection dynamics, combated by rationalism and science.

It vexes other people too, and some of them write books explaining why. Last year, the most notable such book was Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. It came across as shrill in places, but the arguments it musters are stark and compelling. A decade earlier, Carl Sagan wrote The Demon-Haunted World (“Science as a candle in the dark”). Sagan was too polite to attack religion proper — he took aim instead at pseudo-science and superstition, hoping perhaps that the credulous among his readership would spontaneously apply the lessons of the book to their own beliefs. He was optimistic.

Now Richard Dawkins has stepped up with the angriest book yet, The God Delusion. We all know Richard Dawkins can write — he has penned one of the best science popularizations ever — so I snapped up his latest effort, only to be hugely disappointed. Here’s why:

First, I think the condescending anger he sustains throughout the book is most ineffective if — as he writes — he intends the book to be used as a tool for enlightening the credulous.

Second, the books bears all the hallmarks of a rushed job, cobbled together from prefabbed opinion pieces. There is little continuity between chapters — some are excellent, such as the one on the secularism of the founding fathers of the United States and the one on the atheism of Einstein, while other are embarrassing attempts to throw anything at his target to see if it will stick. He also quotes Sam Harris’ book far too frequently as an example of somebody who said it just right. In other words, just read Sam Harris’ book instead.

I have a suspicion that Richard Dawkins is in fact a pathological atheist — he’ll advance both good and bad arguments in favor of atheism without differentiating between the two. In a similar fashion, there are people who were against the Iraq War for all the wrong reasons — this didn’t make the Iraq War just, of course; I just wish they weren’t advancing my cause.

Had Richard Dawkins instead blogged the contents of his book, the result would have been pitch-perfect, the to-and-fro far more entertaining, and his readership comprised far more of the kinds of people this book is intended to reach — American Christians.

There is redemption, however, in one of the best little nonfiction books I’ve read in a long time, Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza — The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated at the age of 23 from the Amsterdam community of Jews in 1656 for his supposed atheism, managed to flourish among a small community of free thinkers in the relative tolerance of 17th-century Netherlands. To Spinoza, God is synonymous to Nature; there is no mind-body duality, there is no afterlife — and wonder of the natural world around us amounts to a rational love of God.

This repurposing of the term “God” was radical for his time, but it is a notion that coexists without difficulty with modern science. Einstein strongly associated his own metaphysical stance with that of Spinoza. When Einstein refers to God, he is referring to a Spinozan god, a synonym for Nature.

What Goldstein’s book brings out especially well is that Spinoza is the very model of a virtuous atheist. He abhorred violence, he relied on reason to persuade, and he lived unperturbed by the disapprobation of the prevailing dogmas. He applied the principles of his magnum opus, <a href="http://www.mtsu.edu/~rbombard/RB/Spinoza/ethica-front.html" title="The Ethics“>The Ethics, to his own life, and in so doing presents the best rebuttal yet for the prejudices mainstream religionists in the US and elsewhere still carry against atheists. This is why I think a newfound appreciation of Spinoza in the US would be more likely to bring about a change of attitudes there than Dawkins’s book.

I also think that Spinoza’s ideas are essential to the 21st century, which is shaping up to be the century where dogma has its last hurrah. If we are going to come out of it alive, it will be because we learn Spinoza’s lessons sooner rather than later.

Last weekend I was in Antwerp for a wedding, so I took the opportunity to go visit Spinoza’s house in Rijnsburg, a two-hour drive north:

The house has this poem affixed to the wall:

In English:

If only people were wise
And wished each other well!
Earth would be a paradise
Now it’s mostly hell.

My sentiments entirely.