Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) is a right wing blogger, video gamer and part-time Christian fantasy novelist. He is the literary equivalent of Ann Coulter and his frequent invocation of the Holocaust, race, gender, class and other cultural hot buttons on his Vox Populi blog is an exercise in intellectual bomb throwing. Beale's latest work, "The Irrational Atheist" is available as a free download, and covers material familiar to readers of his blog. In particular, this book is Beale's attempt at disarming the recent resurgence in atheist and humanist literature at which he takes personal affront. At book length, his style is repetitive and the casual first person writing that works in blog form isn't up to the challenge. By the second or third chapter, the snide comments and geeky references to video games and pop culture become downright annoying. The appeal of Beale's blog is the instant, politically incorrect controversy and bold pronouncements he is fond of, and they simply cannot sustain an entire book. I found myself reading ahead, waiting for him to write something controversial rather than wading through pages of unstructured and predictable attacks on Hitchens, Dawkins et al. Beale admits himself that he lacks the powerful prose and story-telling ability of Hitchens, and the rambling nature of Beale's book is worlds away from the scientific approach of an author like Dawkins. In many ways, Beale is a mirror image of Hitchens and this book is like a pale Minnesota cousin of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Beale shares the burning desire to speak out strongly on behalf of his beliefs, but unlike his nemesis Hitchens he lacks the experience to sustain the argument beyond pot-shots at his opponents, and the skill to engage the reader for more than a page or two. As expected, Beale gives short shrift to science, and topics such as evolution, "intelligent design" and the like are barely covered. His preferred mode of deflating his opponents arguments is reliance on flawed logic, cherry picking of historical data and secondary sources and unending confusion between causation and correlation. Surprisingly, Beale also falls back on the hoariest of old arguments in favor of his religion. One moment he accuses Dawkins of "attacking the reasons some people used to believe in God more than 700 years ago", and then a few pages later Beale drags out these ancient crutches himself, with appeals to authority and belief from personal experience and incredulity. None of these are as constant however as Beale's continual straw man - his conflation of religious and political ideologies, which he devotes entire chapters to. If this is Beale's best example of arguments for the existence of the supernatural, then perhaps he shouldn't have bothered. Beale has a penchant for rhetoric based on sources that are difficult to verify and in several cases fail to support his argument when checked. For example, on p174 Beale disputes Hitchens source for the inaccuracy of the gospels (Ehrman), but checking the source does not support his claim. Making this claim based on a debate transcript is a lazy way for Beale to sidestep direct criticism of a primary source (Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus)) where Beale would clearly be way out of his depth. Readers of the Vox Populi blog will spot many disingenuous statements that contradict Beale's previous positions. His claim that he has "no inherent problem with atheists or agnostics" and that he is "not asking you to respect my beliefs" ring false to any regular reader. At one point, I wondered if he was intentionally parodying his fellow believers when he claimed he had invested in Euro's "because of the eschatological implications of the Book of Revelations", but I suspect he would fail to see the humor in that. Beale sums up his own epitaph quite nicely on the opening page. "It may seem crazy that a computer game designer [...] should dare to dispute an Oxford don, a respected university professor, a famous French philosopher...". Yes, Mr Beale, it is crazy to expect that this book, full of logical fallacies, contempt for others and ad-hominem attacks, could hope to overturn hundreds of years of enlightenment thinking, or even approach the writing of an author like Hitchens who has been dissembling believers back when Beale was still playing video games. The final nail in the coffin is Beale's need to hide behind his pretentious Vox Day pseudonym. His personal references fall flat because he never reveals himself in the fashion that Hitchens and Dawkins have. As a result, Beale's anonymous, grandiose posturing doesn't engage my critical faculties in the same way other authors do. Amazon reviewers who rated this book highly wrote of Beale attacking, pummeling, punching, bombing, mugging, destroying, slaying, burning, obliterating, beheading and committing carnage on his humanist opponents, which is an interesting choice of violent analogies and betrays the depth of their personal commitment to a chosen belief system. In this readers case, Beale's blog provides infinitely better value for money. I'll stick to browsing that when I need an occasional chuckle.