Views from Crestmont Drive

Finishing up key points and detailed notes on the second half of this book. Will have some general comments, and notes on the appendices, tomorrow.

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Here’s a book published in 2006. The author, Daniel C. Dennett, is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. He became grouped among the four so-called “new atheists” of the 2000s, along with Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, though despite Michel Onfray’s characterization of the group as “angry,” Dennett doesn’t sound the least bit angry at all, just intellectually curious.

The theme of the book is how to understand religion as a natural phenomenon, that is, part of the social evolution of the human race; it’s not a book about the particulars of religious beliefs or religion’s claims to supernatural knowledge.

Page 15: “For many people, probably a majority of the people on Earth, nothing matters more than religion. For this very reason, it is imperative that we learn as much as we can about it. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book.”

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