Horrors and Absurdities of Religion

I had this book lying around on my Kindle for years and I think I downloaded it back when I was on a personal crusade to understand religion and atheism. I never came around to reading it all these years because I had this notion of it being a difficult read, coming for a German philosopher, especially when there were authors writing about atheism in a more accessible manner i.e. Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. But I finally got around to picking it up, thinking to myself how I’m “old” enough to understand the writings of these famous philosophers.

The first part of the book is a dialogue between two characters, one arguing for Religion and the other against it. Both put up logical arguments while trying to counter the other’s. It’s a surprisingly interesting read for me because there aren’t many books that present a neutral view when it comes to religion, a topic on which people (myself included) almost always have strong convictions. Particularly, that religion is a carrier of truth and is purposefully cloaked in allegory and myths so as to make it digestible to mankind at large arguing that mankind can never endure it pure and unalloyed. This thought is countered with the fact that humans are fallible and that using untruth as a vehicle for truth is more harmful. There are passages discussing ethics, morals, and humanity in the second half of the book which are equally interesting to read.

It was an extremely slow read, I was going through a couple of pages in a session supplementing them with reading articles or opinions on the internet trying to understand the author’s intent. And even then, despite grasping what I think is a reasonable amount of insight after reading this book, I felt I missed around half of what the author was trying to say. I’d love to re-read this sometime in the future to see whether I could grasp the things I missed in the past or whether my understanding has changed from when I last read it.