Allah, Jesus, and Yahweh: The Gods That Failed
This is an extremely impressive book, one which should enlighten any open-minded reader, theist and non-theist alike. Harrison transports the reader from the ancient battle at Marathon across two millennia, following the march of civilization to the present day. He shows in a clear and engaging manner the moral corruption that is inherent in the ancient texts that continue to serve as the scriptural foundations of modern religions. His compelling mixture of philosophy, theology, astronomy, psychology and physics, presented always in a very accessible and entertaining style, persuasively demonstrates how science illuminates and promotes understanding while religion ossifies thinking patterns and all too often produces intergroup conflict. I highly recommend this book to all.------James E. Alcock: Professor of Psychology, Author, and SkepticHilarious and powerful. Equal to anything written by Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett, the Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse. -------Bill Walker, FreethinkerI really enjoyed reading and thinking about this new book, Allah, Jesus, and Yahweh. As the Arab Spring in Egypt is rapidly turning into something more like the Winter of their Despair this subject is especially topical. This book adds many significant and thoughtful insights into the religious source for current political and social conflicts around the world. It is thoughtful, well researched and clearly expressed. Harrison would certainly have no problem holding up his end of the conversation in a gathering of the new atheists.There are so many things that I admire about this book that I can t begin to put them all in this review, but here are just a few. I love the way the author used the mythological figures of Epios and Phemos to emphasize the importance of approaching the issue of beliefs from both a scientific and artistic perspective. I couldn t agree more. The way in which he used the myths about the two of figures as book-ends, creates a very satisfying framework to the book. In between, he presented readers with a wealth of fascinating historical, cultural, scientific, and literary information.I was especially impressed by the way Harrison used the writer s voice to engage his readers. For most of the book, he used an ironic (often humorous) tone that works very well to keep a potentially heavy subject, light and approachable. I noticed that from time to time there is another, much more angry, voice that comes through in his writing (e.g. p.243 ff. and p.294 ff.). His judicious and sparing use of that voice makes it all the more effective. His prose style really takes flight in these passages great use of rhetorical flourishes!Something else that worked really well for me was the author s use of personal anecdotes to illustrate some of his arguments (e.g. preface, p.115. p.252. p.288, p.301). The one that really stood out for me was the story about Mother Courage p.252 ff. The author re-creates his experience with the bear and her cubs very vividly for the reader. I found it not only very germane to his point about the presence of morality in nature, but also very moving.If religions/mythologies are products of the human imagination and not divine revelation, then it makes sense to me that these stories would reflect the full range of our imaginations. Humans certainly don t need gods or devils to account for the evil in the world. We are quite capable, as news reports confirm daily, of all manner of evil. But, as the author s story about Mother Courage so aptly illustrates, humans, as well as the rest of the natural world, are also capable of all manner of good. It all goes to hell , as he argues so effectively, when we mistake a metaphor for a fact and twist those fictions into a dogma that one group tries to impose onto another.This book deserves a wide readership. -------Dirk Verhulst