Donna Bowman wrote about the book "Dawkin's tone changes from mockery, in the early going, to outrage, as he contemplates the monstrous consequences of belief in a sovereign, transcendent God who demands obedience and therefore cannot do otherwise than place himself above human understandings of the good" (610).
With Dawkins' book being rather controversial, I wondered if some libraries or bookstores would be challenged by its presence on their shelves. A google search for this information brought me to http://signsoflifebooks.com/blog/. It looks like a Christian bookstore did not carry The God Delusion, but did purchase The Dawkins Delusion? by Alister and Joanna McGrath. A second website contained an article titled Godless Dawkins Challenges Schools which tells how Dawkins was planning to flood schools with anti-religious literature.
Now that it looked like Dawkins was challenging others as much or more than he's been challenged, I did a search on OCLC to see which book was available in libraries more, The God Delusion or The Dawkins Delusion? A search for The God Delusion retrieved 72 results in Indiana and 2194 worldwide. A search for The Dawkins Delusion? retrieved 22 results in Indiana and 560 worldwide.
In summary, I thought that I might see multiple instances of The God Delusion being challenged. I was quite surprised and pleased to see this does not appear to be the case. Regardless of what I might feel about the content of the book, I feel it should still be offered for those who might be interested in it.
Bowman, Donna. Rev. of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. The Midwest Quarterly
Summer 2007: 609-611.
Linker, Damon. "In Godless Books, Mindless Arguments; Far from Shoring Up the Secular
Political Tradition, Atheism's Ultramilitant Movement is Championing a New Form of
Intellectual Totalitarianism." The New Republic National Post 7 Jan. 2008. 10 Jan. 2008
2 comments:
I'm really surprised that you didn't really find much about that book being challenged. I remember hearing a little bit about it when it first came out from friends, and figured it would bring in major controversy. It seems, however, that it's the books targeted to children and young adult readers that really face the ire of challenges. I can't really see this book being put on the recommending reading list for a high school course in the U.S. anytime soon.
I agree with Ruth's take on it. Books that are challenged are almost always ones that create controversy because of fears about children being exposed to something dangerous.
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