God is not Great

The other book I've been reading over the last month was God is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens. I picked this up after seeing the Intelligence Squared debate regarding "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world", with Hitchens and Stephen Fry on one side, and Archbishop Onaiyekan and Anne Widdecombe on the other. It was a good watch, and hugely improved my opinion of Hitchens.

I'm generally aware of the state of the "Culture Wars" going on, particularly in the USA, between the secular world and the resurgent religious fundamentalism. I've been supportive in general of the "New Atheism" - Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, whats-his-face Dawkins, etc., basically because without them it's a one sided argument. I'm an atheist, but like most atheists I feel there is a kind of pointlessness to arguing for my position. There are lots of things I don't believe in that I don't ever get questioned about - my lack of belief in Dragons and Unicorns, the Tooth Fairy, and so on. But when you wander around being an atheist, you do get called on your lack of belief in the various Gods that people have invented over the years. It's good to see there are people on our side willing to take on the fight, and risk all the death threats and personal attacks that inevitable arrive when you criticize religions. It's those proselytizers who wander around hassling non-believers (and believers in slightly different versions of their own god) that tend to give all believers a bad name, and result in my general lack of tolerance for religion in general. On an intellectual level, I'm perfectly supportive of people's right to believe in gods, and I'm quite supportive of the broad deism that typifies many people who were raised with organised religion but have drifted away from their church; but I do think a world without religions and other superstitions would be a better place.

The book itself was a great read - very well written, clear, and intelligent. I found myself really enjoying reading it; Hitchens says better than I ever could why religion as a bad thing, from a rational, ethical, historically knowledgeable point of view. He mentions some of the arguments for the existence of god, and points out the glaring holes in them; but in the main this book takes it for granted that religions are, in general, incorrect, and is mainly arguing why religion in general, and churches in particular, are a bad thing.

He makes a key point when he recalls a radio host once asking him whether if he was walking down the street after sunset, and a group of men were walking towards him, wouldn't he feel safer if he knew they had just come from a prayer meeting? Hitchens responds that no, at most times and in most places, he wouldn't. Certainly not in Baghdad, or Beirut, or Belfast, or several other cities beginning with B.

This is a book I would recommend to anyone to read. It expounds in great depth and with great vigour why we'd be better off without religions; that the rational person has no need for religion, and that it in fact tends to make people less rational and gives them excuses to absolve themselves of great evils. It also acknowledges that we are imperfectly rational mammals, and that we probably have a need for religion to fill in the gaps left by our lack of rationality. If you're religious, it'll show you that your churches haven't been the forces for goodness that they like to protray themselves as; if you're atheist or agnostic it'll show you that there are people who think like you, and that there are very good reasons for living the way you do.

Transition

Things have been a bit quiet here on the Stuff By Dan front; it's been an absurdly busy month (with another absurd month or two ahead), and the latest book I have read has those badly-sized chapters that mean I have a choice of about 5-10 minutes of reading, or 40 minute of reading. For me, 20 minutes is about the ideal chapter length, since it means I get a fair bit read each evening before bed, but not so much that I'm awake all night reading, or falling asleep before the chapter ends.

Also, I was reading two books simultaneously. But more on that in the next post.

I've just finished Transition, by Iain Banks (oddly, not Iain M Banks). It's that very difficult breed of novel, a Multiverse novel.

A big problem with science fiction is making all the worlds your characters visit feel like real, and distinct worlds. It's why I avoid running space opera roleplaying games; I never feel it's really possibly to evoke the sense of a real world when it's a different planet you're visiting every session. Multiverses are even harder, as it's a different world in a different universe that is being visited. Banks, on the other hand, is a masterful world builder, so he can get away with these sorts of shenanigans.

Transition gets around this by having the transitions between universes being only possible between similar universes; in fact, the characters can only transition into bodies and minds similar to their own; and it's only their mind that transitions. It's often hard to tell which universe any particular part of the story is taking place in; our Earth is frequently visited, as is Calbefraques, the version of Earth where the ability to transition was discovered. Each different version of Earth has branched from ours at some time in the past, and there are infinities of possible earths between each of these universes, corresponding, presumably, to every branching possible outcome of every event in the Earth's history.

Once you get past the very Science Fictional setting, the story is more a spy thriller than a Sci Fi novel. The main protagonist, Temudjin Oh, is a Transitionary, one of the rare breed who can transition between Universes. He is an agent for l'Expedience, aka. The Concern, and organisation based on Calbefraques, which has the duty of sending its Transitionaries to different realities, and making butterfly-effect changes to a single person's life that end up changing that world in a big way. Things naturally get more complicated as conspiracies are unveiled and motives revealed, and it marches to an exciting, if somewhat small-scale, conclusion.

I'm yet to find a Banks novel that I'm disappointed by when I get to the end. Admittedly, I wasn't able to really start reading Feersum Endjinn, but the others are great. Transition never feels quite on the scale of Banks' other Science Fiction; novels like The Algebraist and his Culture novels overwhelm the imagination with the sheer scale of things. No-one can write an interstellar war like Banks. Transition is smaller, more personal, and deals with the intrigues between a small group of people who know each other quite well.

So, it's worth a read, but if you haven't read Banks, I'd start somewhere else in his corpus.