rating: 4 of 5 stars
FASCINATING. Don’t Sleep just about successfully bridges the gap between professional ethnography and popular autobiography.

Everett was a linguist with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an evangelical organization which sends linguist-missionaries to learn the languages of various cultures so that they may translate the New Testament for them and thereby save their souls. He went to the Pirahã with this goal in mind, accompanied by his wife and three children.

Interspersed with his stories of learning to live with this radically different culture is extensive information on their unique language and a hilarious (to me, a linguistics dork) intellectual sparring with Chomsky’s theories of universal grammar.

Don’t Sleep is being pimped around the atheist blogosphere as a book about a missionary who is deconverted by his subjects. And yes, that happens, but it is contained in the epilogue, and the book is by no means about that experience. That part is a little infuriating to read, though–Everett went through hell on earth trying to get help for his wife and one of his daughters when they were very ill with malaria, yet when he came clean about no longer believing in a god, she left him. (Kiiiiinda wanna scratch her face for that, lol.) Seems to me that dragging a feverish and delusional person all over Brazil for a week trying to save her LIFE would be proof enough of a morality that doesn’t necessarily come from religion, but whatever. The point is, not much is made in the book proper of the deconversion. More important is the clash of Everett’s Western, Christian culture and the Pirahã culture–he cannot convert them to a belief in a god they cannot see, as they generally aren’t concerned about anything not in their direct experience. In fact, we do not know of a single Pirahã conversion. They just can’t be arsed.

So: if you’re interested in language, the cultures of the Amazon basin, religion and irreligion, or the lives of ethnographers, this is a good one.

Tags: atheism, Christianity, Daniel Everett, ethnography, irreligion, linguistics

rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book really should have been two books. For half the book Taibbi is investigating how Congress really works (a topic that he reports on quite well and makes understandable, but that really could fill hundreds of pages on its own). For most of the rest of it, he’s in deep cover at John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church, exposing the craziness of the people who appear to have taken over government and public discourse. I would have loved to have seen more of this as well, and maybe he could supplement it with undercover stints at Saddleback or New Life. I enjoyed his style and his passion, but I think the squashed-togetherness of this book might have deranged me a little. Even a two-part series would have worked better.

Tags: irreligion, Matt Taibbi, politics

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I will let the book speak for itself:

“The world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary crimes–like blasphemy–and where the totality of a child’s education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry. If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits all of us.

“The contest between our religions is zero-sum. Religious violence is still with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowledge and secular interests are restraining the most lethal improprieties of faith. It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity.” (p. 224-225)

“Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call ’spiritual.’ No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.” (p. 227)

Tags: agnosticism, atheism, irreligion, Sam Harris

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Another great book that will be passed over by the very people who need to read it. Jacoby outlines the history of America’s willful ignorance and how it manifests today. She gives no suggestions on how to fix the situation; indeed, she doesn’t think it can be fixed, the way things are going. Americans just enjoy being stupid too much.

I disagree with her on two major points. First: I don’t think the Internet is necessarily killing intellectual discourse. In fact, I think that for those of us who are too shy to hold such conversations in person–or for those of us who are surrounded with the type of person Jacoby reviles–the Internet can be a great facilitator. I have been part of many good, intellectual conversations in blog comment threads. Jacoby seems to think that only ignorant non-sequiturs get posted to these threads, and that the other commenters don’t police them. This could not be further from the truth. Check out blogs like Shakesville; the commentariat there is ruthless in the driving out of trolls.

Second: Jacoby does not seem to take into consideration that many Americans work a LOT. When you’re working twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, you don’t have a lot of mental energy left to read something educational or engage in stirring discourse about the failings of Plato. It’s easy to see how people could extrapolate from their own experiences that people who do these things obviously don’t work grueling, mind-numbing jobs, and are therefore somehow less. Maybe if the economic situation were better and people didn’t have to work so hard, they’d be more accepting of intellectuals…But then, it is their disdain of intellectuals that helped lead America to elect The Big Dumb twice, and possibly to elect The Even Bigger Dumb in 2012. So, I don’t know.

Tags: agnosticism, America, atheism, freethought, ignorance, irreligion, reason, religion, Susan Jacoby, willful ignorance

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Mr. Hitchens illustrates in examples from his own life and career, as well as in views from historical religious, philosophical, and political figures, exactly why religious beliefs are not worthy of respect by default. Particular examples: why religious people should not be prima facie considered more moral or ethical than non-religious people; why claims such as “God outlawed the eating of ham because it made the ancients ill” are specious; why religious people’s need to prove their faith based on reality actually undermines their case; and why even Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama cannot be seen as stellar examples of goodness simply on the basis of their faith.

As with Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, the people who need to read it won’t. But it’ll keep a place on my bookshelf.

Tags: agnosticism, atheism, Christopher Hitchens, injustice, irreligion

rating: 5 of 5 stars
The last James Morrow book I read was just pure gleeful blasphemy. This one is still fairly blasphemous, but it also asks a serious question: What would people do if they had concrete, smelly proof that God was 1) a corporeal being and 2) currently dead? Morrow shows the reactions of all types of people–nonbelievers, hardcore atheists, feminists, indifferent people, evangelical Christians, and the Vatican–in this thoughtful work. He balks at no embarrassing question, even wondering if God has a penis, and if so, what it looks like. (If you’re wondering–yes, and very big but otherwise normal.) The struggle to tow the massive Corpus Dei to his angel-built Arctic tomb (and find redemption for the tow-ship’s troubled captain) is compelling.

There are a couple of sequels that I can’t wait to get my hands on.

Tags: agnosticism, atheism, Christianity, God, irreligion, James Morrow

rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you don’t enjoy blasphemy, you probably want to steer clear of this one. I, however, find blasphemy to be a tasty treat, so I enjoyed it a lot, if very quickly. There are some very interesting ideas here: what if someone besides Noah’s family escaped the Flood, what if God reversed his Babel punishment and made everyone understand themselves perfectly, what if Moses had not received a second set of commandments after destroying the first. I love the reimagining of old stories, so I thought this book was pretty cool.

Tags: agnosticism, atheism, awardwinner, blasphemy, fractured faerietales, irreligion, James Morrow