I finally finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon last week. It was over 1.1k pages long, making it one of the longest I’ve read. You can read an excerpt of my review here. The full thing is on my review page. Also, don’t miss Bunnies4Buddha’s newest review on her page.

In addition to many of the characters of Cryptonomicon being inter-related, they are the descendants of Characters from The Baroque Cycle. The similarities and differences between the related characters and their situations are interesting and often surprising.

These books share other similarities with one another. First, not all the mysteries and plot lines are fully resolved by the end of the book. While this may leave some readers dissatisfied, I believe it adds an element of realism. Real life is never as tidy as our stories would have us believe. Second, Stephenson doesn’t shy away from science, technology, and history in his books. He includes specifics about cryptographic techniques, German U-boat technology, Pacific arena battle sites, and even use of the Zeta function as a pseudo random number generator. In previous books, he delved into metallurgy, Sumerian religious practices, pre-Reformation European politics, Philosophy, and the calculus. This makes them a joy to read for geeks like myself.

Now I’ve picked up Paine: Collected Writings only do discover it is over 800 pages (the rice paper made it deceptively thin). I’m not sure I can take that many pamphlets, letters, and essays by one person all in a row. I’ll probably read this intermittently while I take breaks to read other books. Currently I’m reading Common Sense and will offer a review of each piece as I complete it.

B4B has written another great book review and I didn’t want you to miss it. This one was her most recent nonfiction book, Ghosts of Vesuvius: A New Look at the Last Days of Pompeii, How Towers Fall, and Other Strange Connections.

Bunnies4Buddha is often in the middle of two or more books. One of which can always be found on the right sidebar. We try to place the book that she will finish next there. Unfortunately, we can never be sure. In this case, she needed a break from non-fiction and picked up a fiction book: The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd.

As we do for all the books we read from now on, she wrote a review of the book. I thought her review was excellent and wanted to make sure that my readers were made aware of it. She has a dedicated book review page were you can find this, and all of her reviews.

Incidentally, after a full month of completing it, I finally have a review of The End of Faith by Sam Harris up on my review page. It’s note as good as B4B’s, but I hope you find interesting.

After I got less then half way through C.S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity, I was fairly certain that the rest of the book would have little to offer me. Parts II and III where predicated on accepting both the existence of God and of Christians doctrine in particular. Since Lewis’s argument for the existence of God is poor and his argument for the divinity of Jesus is even worse, it made sense that the rest of the book wouldn’t be applicable.

I was partially wrong. The rest of the book was an interesting mixture of deeply interesting moral insights and disparate attempts at justifying Christianities less savory ‘moral’ rules. Part III of Mere Christianity, “Christian Behavior”, is basically Lewis’s interpretation of Christian Ethics. Trying to summarize all his thoughts on this subject is futile. I will only hit the hight and low points in this post. Suffice it to say that Part III is a great read for Christians and non-Christians alike and a would recommend it to anyone.

One very refreshing thing about Lewis is that he acknowledges that many virtues are not unique to nor invented by Christianity. There are four virtues he identifies as ‘Cardinal’ virtues. These are virtues “which all civilized people recognize”. These ‘Cardinal’ virtues are Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude. He also recognized that the Golden Rule is intuitive in origin, “…Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule… is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right.” Indeed, this is a necessary conclusion for Lewis based on Part I, which states that humans have always been aware of moral truths, even before Christianity. Still, it’s nice to read a Christian who recognizes that non-Christians can be very moral people.

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I’m back from my trip and finally found the time to create my second post about C.S. Lewis’s classic apologetics book, Mere Christianity. In the first post, I talked about enjoying the book quite a bit. I then deconstructed Lewis’s argument for the existence of God, which boils down to the normative moral argument.

I found Lewis’s proof of God’s existence unconvincing. This isn’t that much of a problem for me since I find another argument for God’s existence compelling (though that argument gives little to no insight into God’s nature). But let’s assume that Lewis had succeeded. Let’s suppose that there is a God who created moral laws and gave us the ability to know these laws (conscience). Great, that means we can trust our consciences to guide us to do what is right. But this still falls short of proving that God cares about us, has provided us with an afterlife, sent a son (who was also himself in some mysterious way) to earth to die for our moral failures, ‘inspired’ a book, has a favored people, felled the walls of Jericho, created the world in seven days, told Abraham to kill his son, made Job’s life a living hell, etc. It doesn’t even tell us if God is all powerful, only that It is powerful enough to create moral laws. In short, the normative moral argument fails to prove that the Moral Provider is the God of the Bible.

Thankfully, Lewis addresses this issue. Sadly, I recognized the argument from another book that I partially read, The Case for Christ. At the heart of that book, Lee Strobel argued that Jesus must be who he claimed to be, God, because for anyone making that claim, there are only three possibilities: ether Jesus was telling the truth, crazy, or a liar. Since there is no evidence that he was crazy or a liar, Strobel argued (or, more accurately, Strobel set up ‘experts’ to argue for him), he must have been telling the truth. Imagine my surprise when I read the following from Mere Christianity:

We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. [Jesus] was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

As I discovered about the ‘new’ atheist movement while discussing Bertrand Russel with Scott, there is very little new in Christian apologetics either.

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A few months ago, I read my first Christian Apologetics book, Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton and hated it. When I discussed it with my friend Scott, he lent me Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I must admit, this Christian Apologetics book was much better, even insightful. It was logically written, with clear definitions and little appeal to emotion. Lewis’s approach to defending his religion is the polar opposite of Chesterton’s. It was a joy to read. Well at least the first half for reasons I will discuss later.

This short book is so dense with interesting thoughts and claims that I plan on limiting my discussion to what I consider the three most interesting topics. In the interest of brevity, I will also spread those topics over three separate posts. The three topics are the existence of God, The Case for Christ, and ethical insights. Here is the first:

Lewis starts the book by using a simplified version of the normative moral argument for the existence of god. That is, moral laws are ‘outside of’ ourselves. In other words, moral obligations are independent of one’s goals and universal.

1. It appears to human beings that moral normativity exists.
2. The best explanation of moral normativity is that it is grounded in God.
3. Therefore God exists.

The key word is in premise 1: “appears”. Morality only has the appearance of normativity but is in fact, not normative at all. Furthermore, this appearance has an explanation best grounded in nature. Consider the possibility that morality is an evolved, social instinct. This would then create instinctual moral obligations in almost all (not all, due to genetic variation and/or mental deficiencies) members of the species. i.e. our moral instincts would have the appearance of being universal. Secondly, such an instinct is social and acts on the group level. Thus the moral instinct would sometimes conflict with our one’s own goals. Thus the instinct would have all the appearance of normativity.

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As the title of this post suggests it is time to kick-off the Virtual Book Club! With the new year about to start I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to introduce the two books we picked. So, if you are interested in reading along here they are:

1. The Ominvore’s Dilemma: A Natural History in Four Meals by Michael Pollan

2. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations by Michael Waltzer

I had first planned to create a loose timeline for the VBC to complete reading but alas, I have changed my mind. I want this to be more fluid, more open and more individual – and structured deadlines are anything but that. So as you, the reader, begin reading one or both of the books feel free to comment, to question and to remark in Sid’s Forum section. These titles were chosen to encourage discussions so anything you want to talk about is “fair game”.

The Forum will be routinely monitored and if conversation begins to slow we will offer up new titles for the club to select from.

Thanks to all and Happy Reading!

Bunnies4Buddha

Hello All,

As you know, for some time I have been attempting to create a discussion group about books. Some of you may remember my first attempt that was a disorganized mix of emails and a single page on this website that never quite made it farther than me and a few others buying the books then stacking them on the “to read” shelf. Well I am back at it again but this time Sid and I have worked together (what a concept!) to create a working Virtual Book Club using this blog as a foundation.

Here is the general idea, a book title will be initially introduced in a post, from there those that want to participate can leave their general comments about “reading deadlines” etc. Once a general time frame is created, participants can go to the Forums page and begin conversing about the book via threaded discussions.

So what do you say…are you up for some conversation via Sid’s virtual coffee-house?

Bunnies4Buddha

Last night, I finished reading Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects by Bertrand Russel. Russel was one of those philosophers who I had often heard read about but never read his actual works. Indeed, I have read very little philosophy of that era.

I choose to read this book as part of a challenge. I had an ongoing debate on ReligiousFreaks with MAPK LOTGRE (MAPK L). Eventually, he challenged me to read a Christian apologetics book, Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. I agreed, if he would reread it with me and we then read Why I Am Not a Christian.

Orthodoxy was a painful read and a very slow process for me. Chesterton’s style involved a lot of metaphor and symbolism that I had trouble fully grasping. Also, he seemed to revel in contradictions. Chapter titles like The Paradoxes of Christianity and statements like “The trouble with the candid friend is that he is not candid” set my teeth on edge. If I am anything, I am rational thus any defense of Christianity which relies on the denial of reason will fail with me, as Orthodoxy did. Ultimately, the book ended up being a long-winded version of the “Christianity feels right” argument, which holds no weight with me.

In contrast, Why I Am Not a Christian was written by a philosopher and mathematician. It’s arguments were well laid out, its terms were clearly defined, and its conclusions were rationally supported. This is much more inline with my style. But since this book is a collection of essays, it lacks the cohesiveness of Orthodoxy. Some essays were directly about religion, others related to the topic only tangentially.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the book is that the ‘New Atheism’ movement, championed my Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens is not all that new. The exact same criticisms of religion appears in Russel’s book and the New Atheists’ books. The only thing new in the recent books is the inclusion of Evolutionary Theory as an argument against the existence of God. Also, the New Atheism movement seems to be much larger and louder than any in the past.