Atheist Universe

I've decided to write summaries about books that I have finished reading. Usually, I only add books that I have read into my Shelfari page (www.shelfari.com/njwong88). However, it seems such a waste not to comment on some of the better books that I have read. And Atheist Universe by David Mills is the book that spurred me to starting this.

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So what can I say? This book is fantastic. It is concise, direct, and written in simple language that most folks will understand. There are many books on atheism, but many of them are dry, or wordy, or may require a high level of vocabulary to understand (it is often very interruptive to call up a dictionary to look up words you don't understand while reading). David Mills uses just enough difficult words to present his case, and whenever he uses a difficult word, he will always give the definition immediately after the word, making trips to the dictionary unnecessary. I love this form of writing. It makes this this book highly readable, even for children.

Since I have already read many of the other atheist literature (primarily The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation), I already know many of the anti-theist arguments that have already been presented. However, I like one particular chapter in David Mills book: "Chapter 8: The Myth of Hell", which presents a new perspective on an old argument, but one that I have not read before.

In this chapter, Mills argues that normally, when a criminal is convicted and sent to prison, this banishment to prison is done mainly for 2 reasons: 

1. to separate the criminal from the public - so as to protect the public from being harmed by the criminal. However, depending on the severity of the crime, this separation is only temporarily for minor crimes. Only with major crimes is such separation permanent.

2. to rehabilitate the criminal - especially for criminals who commit minor crimes - and can be rehabilitated before being returned to the general populace.

However, in the Christian hell, no rehabilitation is possible as a person is banished to hell for eternity, and repeatedly tortured for ever and ever. And the "souls" sent to hell will be eternally separated from the ones sent to heaven regardless of the severity of the crime. And a minor crime such as "not accepting Jesus as the saviour", is a hell inducement route, guaranteeing the non-believer eternal damnation.

This conclusion means that God would rather torture humanity than to forgive humanity unconditionally. This conclusion carries the charge that God created Hell for no reason other than to inflict suffering. In this case, as Thomas Paine noted, the Bible could more accurately be called The Word of a Demon than The Word of God. 

In the Old Testament, Yahweh's punishment for people who displease him (such as non-Jews who worship other gods) is merely being massacred by the blessed Jews (the chosen ones). In the Old Testament, once you die, you die. In fact, only in the New Testament with Jesus arrival did he introduced the concept of eternal punishment in hell, and thus making hell become a place for eternal torment. 

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This book may not be as comprehensive as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, but it is still covered a lot of ground. David Mills does not claim to put forward any new ideas in his book. All the information in the book, he claims, are already in the public domain and that the book was meant as consolidation, to put these pieces together to "articulate why...all science and all logic indicate that we live in an Atheist Universe."

David Mills has a web site at http://www.davidmills.net/ where an extract from his book can be downloaded.

I highly recommend Atheist Universe.