I wavered between 3 and 2 stars, not because it's so terrible, but because it fails to do what it set out to do - show that religion is a natural phenomenon.

Dennett is a philosopher, and claims not to be a biologist. Which is fine. But this book is mostly his philosophical speculations on how religious practices and ideas could come about. He rambles, and meanders; you're never quite sure where he's going or why he just jumped to a new topic. Every now and then is a spark of insight, but hardly anything was backed up by empirical studies.

Also, he doesn't understand the religious. Perhaps he's never been a believer. He constantly falls into the trap of assuming that people choose their religion because of what it can offer them. For the most part, I think people choose their religion and stay with it because they think it's true (actually, for the most part, people are born into their religion and stay with it because, at some not insignificant level, they think it's true, probably due to all sorts of cognitive biases and dissonance). Many evangelical Christians don't like the idea of hell, but they think it's what the Bible teaches (it doesn't), and if it's the truth, they just have to accept it (which is how I feel about there being no life after death, as much as I want it).

I finished this book wanting to find one that actually does break the spell of religion and explain how it evolved as a natural outcome of human interaction.

I wavered between 3 and 2 stars, not because it's so terrible, but because it fails to do what it set out to do - show that religion is a natural phenomenon.

Dennett is a philosopher, and claims not to be a biologist. Which is fine. But this book is mostly his philosophical speculations on how religious practices and ideas could come about. He rambles, and meanders; you're never quite sure where he's going or why he just jumped to a new topic. Every now and then is a spark of insight, but hardly anything was backed up by empirical studies.

Also, he doesn't understand the religious. Perhaps he's never been a believer. He constantly falls into the trap of assuming that people choose their religion because of what it can offer them. For the most part, I think people choose their religion and stay with it because they think it's true (actually, for the most part, people are born into their religion and stay with it because, at some not insignificant level, they think it's true, probably due to all sorts of cognitive biases and dissonance). Many evangelical Christians don't like the idea of hell, but they think it's what the Bible teaches (it doesn't), and if it's the truth, they just have to accept it (which is how I feel about there being no life after death, as much as I want it).

I finished this book wanting to find one that actually does break the spell of religion and explain how it evolved as a natural outcome of human interaction.

I've always considered Daniel Dennett an overrated 'thinker', so it was with some trepidation that I picked up this book.

Sure enough, I was a mere five pages in when the disappointment became acute. Dennett says:

"Hardly anybody would say that the most important thing in life is having more grandchildren than one's rivals do, but this is the default summer bonum of every wild animal. They don't know any better. They can't. They're just animals."

This is the kind of archaic idea that underpins all of Dennett's simplifications of the nature of life and existence. I've just finished reading Carl Safina's excellent work 'Beyond Words What Animals Think And Feel', a book written by a lauded Professor of Ecology which completely invalidates the aforementioned statement from Dennett. Existence, life, ecology, intelligence...these are all incredibly complex subjects, almost impossibly so, yet Dennett reduces the entire 'animal kingdom' into one generalised, uninformed category and begins his philosophical speculation from that nonsense datum point. He is erecting castles made of sand, and primitive, unsophisticated ones at that.

On page 111 Dennett says: "Faced with a threatening rival, many animals can make an informationally sensitive decision either to retreat or to call the other's bluff, but there is scant evidence they they have any sense of what they are doing or why."
Arrant nonsense. The discerning reader will stumble upon these short-sighted, dim-witted assertions throughout this book.

Bennett mentions Buddhism several times throughout the book, but the 'religion' practised by approximately 10% of the world's population is given scant attention, perhaps because it flies in the face of the low-hanging theistic targets that Dennett and his ilk like to question? Furthermore on page 198, Dennett quotes another author, Stark, saying: "...as well as the proportion of those churchgoers who are not cut out for high-tension, expensive religions of the sort Stark favours. They exist all over the world; according to Stark and Finke, "there are 'godless' religions, but their followings are restricted to small elites - as in the case of the elite forms of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism." Wow, I don't know where to start with that comment. How does one classify 600 million people as a "small elite" and how does one refer to Buddhism as an "expensive religion"?! Educate yourselves Mr Dennett and Mr Stark...perhaps when you mention "small elites" you're getting confused with Judaism, a religion practised by a mere 16 million people globally but mentioned at every turn throughout the book?

I suppose in the modern world philosophy doesn't pay well and receives little recognition, the best minds are diverted to other fields. Nowhere is this more evidenced than in the nonsense preached by Dennett, an outspoken man with middling intellect. He is a 'philosopher', although I use the term begrudgingly, guilty of scientific overreach; he doesn't know what he doesn't know, but his ego simplifies problems to the point of nonsense so that he can erect deluded edifices of low-brow philosophical expositions.

I started this book about a year ago and after reading ~250 pages I realized I hadn’t payed attention at all and thus read it again + I am happy I did

Not a review-

It is easy to defy religion and it sounds fancy also in some sense these days. But what I wanted to get into exactly by touching this aspect was to understand something like religion which is an important aspect of majority of people in this world. Being a nonbeliever myself and have worked with some time with political group affiliated to left ideology was not convinced by the idea how religion is dealt by them in context of thinking about society as a whole. "Religion is an opium of the society" as Marx says, but do we really think that the religious state is by far worst than the market oriented state of mind. How to decide ? how to go about understanding religion so that we don't fall into that small privileged position of just not believing it , at least in their fancy dinning discourses. This book provides some idea to start thinking about this aspect.

Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon takes a unique method in exposing religion’s potential psychological and societal evolutionary origins. I really appreciate it because this is the only one of the four books that I think a religious person really could read and be left contemplating their beliefs and not just thoroughly offended. Dennett spends the first part of the book explaining whether or not it would be appropriate for a non-religious scholar to study the sociological aspects of religion. In his usual levelheaded tone, he says, “I ask just that you try to keep an open mind and refrain from prejudging what I say because I am a godless philosopher, while I similarly do my best to understand you” (21).

Read more: https://sheseeksnonfiction.blog/2018/...

This was a challenge. I kept putting it aside after reading a few pages, picking it up and digesting a bit more, until about six years ago when I tucked it in my night stand for what I thought would only be a little while. Well...nearly five years ago we had a fire. This was one of maybe 19-20 books I salvaged out of our 5,800 books in our library that were damaged severely due to smoke and soot. After a couple of years of airing out, I let it sit still longer until I picked it up again last year. I had to start over, having most of the thoughts and memories shoved aside, though I kept my flags and my margin notes were intact.

I like Dennett. I think he made a lot of sense, but I also get the sense that this was not as rigorous as his other offerings. Still, I adjusted my perspective on religion years ago because of it (and another book by Pascal Boyer). While I still consider religions and associated beliefs irrational, I have come to an understanding that such is genetically encoded - humans are primed to believe in that which makes no rational sense. That helps me sleep better at night (cliche...I still suck at sleeping) - even if I still don't get it.

This is not a "review". Just a short observation of something that will take much more thought. I owe Dennett a full review, but I admit I'm not up to it right now.

To preface my remarks here, I think it is important that I note Dennett's definition of religion and its implications. He defines religion as social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. Two elements of the definition almost cause me panic as I read them. The first, the fact that any religion is a social system, suggests to me that since one cannot worship a supernatural agent alone, God, a "he" most everywhere you look, is really the collective concept of a group of people who are similarly connected socially and religiously. In a recent Good Reads forum based on Dawkins' The God Delusion, most of the faithful who participated suggested that because so many others believed in God throughout history, their study of "scripture" should not be questioned by me or other participants. Alas, none were willing to address the reasons why their church hung pictures of a Jesus who looked more like a white musician from Seattle than someone from Jesus' home town. This scares me because the faithful have confirmed that their minds are not their own and they have lost the ability to think critically about their beliefs. The other part of the definition that almost leads me to panic, that the participants seek approval from a supernatural agent or agents, means that not only is some vaguely defined and socially reinforced God concept granted greater-than-self status in the minds of the faithful, but the agents' "prophets," to whom enough has been revealed to write a bestseller, are granted God's special favor, and their approval must be sought as well. This scenario is made possible by the aforementioned sacrifice of mind, and enables leaders of any religion you'd care to name to compromise its believers in practically any way.

In Breaking the Spell, Dennett demonstrates faith in people's ability to make clear decisions by suggesting that if school children were to study all of the world's religions, they would learn to think critically and be unwilling to sacrifice this ability for the sake of any supernatural agent or prophet. Should students begin to have thoughts that transcend social/religious paradigms and pressures, no current religious system could survive it, and I think that would be a good thing.

There was some good information and concepts in this book, but they were often very difficult to discover. Dennett is extremely wordy - often needlessly so. And after finishing the book, I'm still struggling to understand exactly what many of his points were. Ultimately he falls short of living up to the title. I had been looking forward to reading Dennett for some time, and I can honestly say that, after this book, I won't pick up another of his. Finally, I really find it pompous when someone quotes their previous works and cites them as reference.

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, author Daniel C. Dennett's main objective seems to be recommending that society undertake a formal, methodical, and overall scientific study of religion to figure out why so many people hold it so dear. Dennet is an atheist and makes it pretty clear that he thinks most religious beliefs are fantasies, but acknowledges that these fantasies appear to provide believers with some benefits and to motivate people to perform good works. Dennet's premise is that believers have a taboo or "spell" about studying religion scientifically, and he wants to break that spell. He doesn't say it explicitly, but it's pretty clear that Dennet expects rigorous examination to show that religion is, by and large, not worth the effort people put into it.

Dennet argues that for religion to have persisted, it must provide some competitive advantage that some other cultural ideas didn't. The middle section of the book is a hypothetical history of how religion might have evolved out of our earliest tendencies to assume that someone or something was responsible for almost everything that happened in the world, from the rising and setting of the sun, to illness and recovery, to weather, to crop failure or success, and so on. A key point in his theory is that religion evolves, much like biological organisms, and is not set in stone or in sacred writings. Dennet isn't necessarily saying his hypothesis is correct, but he feels it gives rise to questions that can be tested and validated.

The book concludes with a few chapters on issues in modern religion, including whether religion is essential for morality, and suggestions for further experiments and studies.

Dennet is a professional philosopher, but claims that this particular book is written for the average reader, not for other philosophers. I think the average reader is going to find this a difficult read, with some rather abstract ideas being presented. There are also copious end notes, three appendices with more detailed material on certain topics, and an index. This is not a light, summer read.

I think a scientific study of religion is a reasonable idea, in the same way we have scientific studies of art, music, and other human cultural behaviours. I don't think, however, it was necessary to take 339 pages (plus appendices and notes) to say that.

I considered for the first time that teaching a child religion might be a form of child abuse. I learned that there might be bio-evolutionary reasons why religions develop and that when we come to see that religion is invented, we need to remember to be gentle with others who might not have seen that. Nonetheless, we owe it to ourselves to consider the costs of religion. It might be that it harms our world more than helps it. If religions were based in fact, we would have to accept that. Since they cannot be proven to be based in fact, we don't have to accept the harm they do.

I now call myself a "bright", that is, someone who accepts that the material world has no creator, no supernatural power. Despite having completed more than a year of studies toward the ministry, I feel relieved by this new awareness. I am a secular humanist. If the world is going to be improved, I now believe it will be because we did the necessary work to make it better. There is no deux ex machina. No god will come save the day.

The book is full of quotations from other authors. Two I particularly liked are:

"It was the schoolboy who said, 'Faith is believing what you know ain't so.'" - Mark Twain

"Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things -- that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg, 1999

Be forewarned: it's not an easy read. At the end of each chapter, Dennet provides a summary of the chapter you've just read and an overview of what's to come in the next chapter.

Assuredly, this is no light reading, for Dennett has a knack for diving deep into his subject, taking great care in leaving nothing out, at the risk of loosing his reader on the way. He lost me, anyway. Though I always enjoy his interviews and conversations with fellow new-atheists, I found myself struggling very hard to follow his line of thoughts in this book, depsite my interest for the topic.

Much less accessible than Hitchens's, Dawkins's or even Harris's works.