Approaching religion as a meme was a great premise... Sadly the book doesn't deliver. There isn't much concrete in it. Mostly a lot of waffle. I accept that he's trying to establish the definitions and conditions before he addresses the question of why religion, and why belief in belief in god, but he eventually doesn't get around to it in a substantial way.

Maybe a book that is better suited to academics and those studying religion's place in human history from a philosophical point of view.

Not a good read, though this book provides insight into how atheist professors of philosophy think about religion. The first part of the book is not unlike a tantrum about the privileged role religion plays in society, and is utterly devoid of value. The last two sections of the book are better—the hypotheses about evolutionary development of religion, most of which could be equally well-applied to many social ideals, are of some interest. These are entirely unsubstantiated and appear to be largely unfalsifiable, as the author somewhat sheepishly admits. The last section makes me happy that the author is not a policy maker, for he vastly underestimated the social value of religion and, for better or worse, the deeply intwined nature of secular and religious institutions. It is no coincidence that evidences of religion date back to the earliest known civilizations. Indeed, it appears that religions generally form a backbone by which a group may build a society upon. Have civilizations outgrown this need? From a secular standpoint, this author would certainly say yes. I am firmly unconvinced.
My most basic complaint about this book is that the author apparently doesn’t understand why people join faiths and adhere to their beliefs. For the most part, it has little to do with the details of theology. It is insulting to insinuate that religious belief is tantamount to an addiction—likely detrimental to health but is a self perpetuating trap for the soul. Yet this is how the author thinks, so he misses the mark by many meters. And there’s the classic atheistic attitude that religious moral imperatives are not helpful to establishing a healthy society. This makes him a poor empiricist or just a regular liar. It is not that people need a carrot and a stick to behave, but that teaching and living the tenets of most religions fosters a culture of pro social behavior.
Ok, so there is a lot to disagree about. But there are good points to be made as well. Thinking about how religions can be improved and their place in society is valuable, and there are some interesting ideas. I agree that the secular world should demand the basic principle of encouraging intellectual curiosity and tolerance within religions. This is a fundamental idea of western liberalism, and allows the coexistence of diverse thought.
In summary, there’s probably not enough of value to justify wading through the trash, especially given the length of the book.

Not likely to break the spell!

Professor Dennett is a philosopher and an expert on consciousness who writes from the perspective of a Darwinian. He is an atheist and calls himself a "bright," an unfortunate coinage from the redoubtable Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine. I say unfortunate because those who do not identify themselves similarly might feel that they should be thought of as--shall we say--less than bright. Such self-designating and flattering terminology, however agreeable to those using it, only serves to isolate them from others--but perhaps that is the point.

Putting that aside, I also need to put aside another of Dennett's mostly irrelevant preoccupations in this otherwise carefully considered and nearly exhaustive examination of religion, namely that of the power of memes. Coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976), a meme is, on the one hand, a fancy word for "idea" and the results of ideas, and on the other hand, a kind of cultural gene or virus that replicates itself through the activities of living things, especially humans. Here's the way Dennett expresses it: "The idea of memes promises...to unify under a single perspective such diverse cultural phenomena as deliberate, foresighted scientific and cultural inventions (memetic engineering), such authorless productions as folklore, and even such unwittingly redesigned phenomena as languages and social customs themselves." (p. 355)

In other words, Dennett believes the term "meme" can be extremely useful by helping us to understand cultural evolution. And, yes, religion can be seen as a meme. However I think his purpose in this book would have been better served if he had narrowed his focus and concentrated exclusively on religion as a natural phenomenon.

And it is that, and Dennett makes a convincing case for scientists to respect something so natural to humans. What he doesn't do is make the case for an end to religion. What he wants is for those in our various religions to have the courage to openly examine their beliefs, tenets and practices and the effect they have on society as a whole. The question, is religion a good or a bad thing? is asked throughout the book, both explicitly and implicitly; however for the life of me I am not sure what Dennett's answer was!--although I can guess. At any rate, its clear that he believes if such an examination were conducted there would be fewer true believers in the world and less pain and suffering.

But religion is not going to go away because religion and humans are as intermixed as the yoke and white of a scrambled egg. For most people a religion is like a thought in your mind. You cannot long be without one. Dennett doesn't care for this idea, I suspect, since he declares that his beliefs do not constitute a religion. A "religion" is a way of life. Tracing the derivation in Webster's International Dictionary (the venerable and highly respected Second Edition) one has to wade through several hundred words before arriving at "8b Acceptance and devotion to such an ideal as a standard for one's own life." For the most part Dennett is using earlier, more exclusive definitions. Of course some people do not have a religion since they live willy-nilly, from one impulse to the next without much foresight or appreciation for past events. But such people are in the minority; indeed they are, in a sense, children.

Dennett calls the reader's attention to the evils and dangers of religion at length while at the same time giving religion its due as a sometime force for good in this world. But much of the good that religion does is seen by Dennett as the result of something like a placebo effect, and would benefit humankind regardless of the "truth" of the religion. He acknowledges studies that show that "regular churchgoers live longer, are less likely to have heart attacks, and so forth...," but adds that many of us "haven't stopped to consider how independent [these results]...are from whether or not any religious beliefs are true." (p. 272) Yes, it would be better--and such a day may come--when our religious beliefs are more in line with reality than they are today, taken as most of them are from the primitive science and psychology of long ago.

Religion also has utility, Dennett allows, because it strengthens people psychologically in some circumstances by giving them resolution and confidence, regardless of the fact that their confidence is based on nothing real. (p. 178) Sometimes any plan or belief--even one that is clearly wrong--is better than no plan or belief. Religion may also help people by creating or strengthening "bonds of trust that permit groups of individuals to act together much more effectively." (p. 178)

Dennett does not add at this point, but very well might have, that the cohesiveness of the tribe under the spell of a charismatic leader of the endemic religion strengthens the tribe in warfare. Indeed my contention is that this is the major reason that those of us living today have a built-in propensity to believe without evidence, because those that didn't died out because they were defeated by tribes that got their warriors to die for the cause in the name of their God. Dennett doesn't explore this path--although he does mention it--probably because he finds "group selection" troublesome.

I wish I had the space to go into more of the many interesting points that Dennett makes or to quibble with some of his conclusions. The book is fascinating and--even though Dennett, as usual, is intent on leaving nothing out--it is readable and lively, more so than some of his other books.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

If I understood it, the basic thesis of Dennett's arrogantly titled Consciousness Explained was that consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from the harmonious orchestration of many smaller, dumber subsystems in the brain. Among the good ideas in Breaking the Spell is the claim that one of these little modules is an "agent detector," and that it's "over-active," so that people experience the wind as the breath of a God; the rain as the God's gift, disease as the presence of exorcisable unclean spirits, and so on. If you do believe in a God or Gods, this is a strong enough book to make it worth your while outmaneouvering it; if you don't, this is a strong enough book to take on as an ally. It has little or none of the hysteria you find in Dawkins and Hitchens.

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.

Subtitle: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Daniel Dennett is an intellectual's intellectual. He is the sort of thinker that gets mentioned in the writings of Douglas Hofstadter or Susan Blackmore, and they don't necessarily spend much time telling you who they're referring to. Like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Stephen Pinker, or Noam Chomsky, they can pretty much assume that if you're reading their kind of book, you already know who Daniel Dennett is. The reality is, that's usually true.

Dennett's background is not that of a linguist, biologist, physicist, or any of the other normal routes to pop-science prominence. He's a philosopher, and in this book he's trying to take on religion. "Take on" could mean "try to analyze" or "try to combat", and most readers (whether religious or not) will find the second meaning more apt.

To a certain degree, I have to say that Dennett's protestations of unbiased neutrality on the topic of religion are a bit disingenuous. Does he really expect any of his readers, religious or otherwise, to think that the title "Breaking the Spell" has nothing to do with the idea of breaking the hold of religion on people's minds? Dennett has a lot of ideas in this book worth reading and thinking about, and it made me a bit impatient when he would muddy it with a page or two in which he tried to feign uncertainty on the topic of religion. The writer doth protest too much; we know he is not a believer, so this kind of thing just reduces his credibility with the reader.

And, whatever he might wish, nearly none of his readers will be religious in the conventional, western sense that he mostly concerns himself with. The central thesis of the book is that religion should not be above or exempt from analysis, as a human phenomenon, like music or marriage or commerce; few people who are followers of a religion are happy to have it analyzed by outsiders (especially not if that religion asserts that it originates in divine revelation).

Nonetheless, Dennett does a decent job of looking at what has been learned in the last couple decades about how (and a bit of why) we believe. Not so long ago, the relationship between science and religion was primarily adversarial, or occasionally uneasy truce. In more recent years, a few researchers have begun to look at religion and religious belief as a topic to be investigated. This is a relatively new tactic; for several centuries, scientists have either avoided the topic of religion entirely, or dismissed it as superstition.

Dennett looks into questions like, might religion be a good thing for society even if it is entirely false? What are the (evolutionarily advantageous) human traits which predispose most people to religious belief? How and why can a person be simultaneously a believer in the importance of religion, and a disbeliever (i.e. they don't believe in God but they are opposed to anyone admitting to atheism openly)? Dennett covers all of these questions in a way that is pleasant to read without being vapid.

The interesting part will come when these researchers start to discover things about how the human brain works when it believes in the spiritual, and how religions work when they recruit and retain believers. Understanding how a thing works, almost inevitably starts to suggest strategies for making that thing stop working, and religious leaders will not appreciate being studied by the enemy.

It is equally likely, of course, that knowing how a thing works suggests strategies for making it work even better, and a better understanding by researchers of how religion works might enable religious leaders to more precisely tune the details of their sermons, churches, and evangelical outreach to maximize the results they want. One could imagine atheists grappling with their own moral dilemma, as they ponder whether research into how to expand religion is something that scientists should oppose, in the same way some oppose research into technologies that find easy application in warfare.

So far, though, we have only the beginning questions and preliminary results. Dennett's book is most useful as a good survey of the possibilities of what it might mean if we learn more (as we almost certainly will). If you think science and religion have had a bumpy relationship up to now, just wait until you see what's coming. Or, if you can't wait, read this book for a hint at it.

The American philosopher Daniel Dennett, those ethos goes beyond philosophy 'per se' to also embrace science (from neurosciences to evolutionary biology) claims to attacks here a taboo: that according to which religion on the one hand, and the beliefs flowing out of religions on the other, are to be sheltered from scientifical, critical enquiry.

Mmh?

At this point, of course, we need to press the 'pause' button. It's been a long while (at least since David Hume!) that religion has been considered as a natural phenomenon, and, so, subjected to all sorts of rational, critical outlooks rooted in sciences to try and understand it as much as to explain it. Philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, biologists and else -that he quotes at will- all had a contribution to make. Yes, but...

Yes but, the author targets here American readers. And in the USA indeed, a far more religious country than others even in the Western world, there seems to be a 'taboo' in seeing religious beliefs being put under a microscope to be analysed. It's a ridiculous mindset, of course, but that Dennett needs to demolish outright first and foremost. As such, the first few chapters will read, well, like door breaching an open door for those not in the US!

Once this out of the way, though, the book truly picks up, especially since its endeavour is to try and explain why such taboo is in the first place. For that, he goes back to the origins of religious beliefs, a product of evolutionary biology through natural selection. He, indeed, sees it as a necessity, born out of our need to understand our environment so as to better adapt ourselves to it. Religion, then, is like a meme, which has evolved to morph, over centuries, into the institutions we all know. Why, then, such a staunch defensive attitude when such outlook is being brought up? This is where he introduces his concept of 'belief in the belief'.

Being American, Dennett uses Christianity as an example. He constates, indeed, two things:

1- believers themselves struggle to define what they mean by 'God'; from the anthropomorphic God of the Old Testament to a vague, abstract concept influenced by pantheism and where even evolution can be accommodated,

2- believers are not only contradicting each other about what is 'God' but they, also, adhere to various churches of all sorts of denominations which, all, regardless of their differences, insist upon the benefits of faith.

He sees here something crucial: to him, it's not the belief or not in God, whatever one thinks of God, which matter. To him, what matters is the idea that believing is essential. Why? Well, according to those preaching it, because it is a source of morale, a weapon against nihilism, the roots to strong communities, a link between individuals, and a scaffold to social network. To preach faith, then, is perceived as a virtue, while to challenge faith is perceived as a threat to social order and morale. Put bluntly: beliefs are secondary; what matters is the belief in the belief that faith is good.

Now, of course, if religion really was the source from which flows our ethics and morale, our sense of right and wrong, then, yes, such taboo would be justified. The thing is: it isn't. Dennett, here, rightly reminds us that empathy is as natural as cruelty. The taboo, then, is absurd.

All in all, here's a book slow to start, and it will seem blatantly obvious to many readers not based in the USA. Yet, its core argument -'belief in the belief'- is striking indeed, and, I suspect, will get the approval even of many religious believers themselves. A must read.

Pros: Dennett's clear and light-hearted (self-effacing even) style of writing has the ability to bring readers from all walks of life into his theories and examples. He weaves evolutionary theory into several disciplines, and isn't as pedantic as some philosophers writing in the same area(s). In Breaking the Spell, he approaches religion from his standard naturalist worldview and posits the question "Cui bono?" (who benefits?) throughout the work as he attempts to explain the origin and survival of religion in terms of natural selection. Also, he scratches the surface of the doxastic systems required to be religious (paraphrasing 'Believers have to BELIEVE they can believe in the facets of their faith.') which leads to an interesting discussion regarding propositional attitudes towards religious belief.

Cons: Dennett sometimes ruins his charade of neutrality by getting on his atheist stump and preaching (to the choir - for who else will read his work?) which detracts from the arguments and hypotheses he presents. Also, some explanations - while relevant and usually fun - run a little long. The worst offense is the strength (if any) of his arguments is diminished by his lack of conviction to really hammer his solid points home. I suspect he doesn't want to sound dogmatic, or even worse, be quoted and pigeonholed forever by his claims. But then again, his claims are so vague now that he could be erring so far on the side of caution that his work will fail to make a significant impact.

Overall: I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the study of religion. I would not recommend this book to professional philosophers (and I think Dennett intended it to be this way).

One of his more enjoyable books and easier to understand than most of his other works.

Dennett my love

Molto interessante e ben argomentato.
Niente affatto fumoso o farraginoso.

I really wanted to like this book, because I'd just finished reading The End of Faith and God is Not Great, but this book suffers from lack of conviction. Where The End of Faith is the absolute model of conviction, and God is Not Great lays out convincing arguments (but takes some of their momentum away with dryly humorous asides), Breaking the Spell has neither conviction nor cleverness.

I confess I only read the first couple of chapters, because I lost interest in an author who wasn't willing to commit to a point of view. He's basically saying yes, religion is a dangerous, polarizing influence on human behavior but hey: you can believe whatever you wanna believe - can't we all get along?

The reason I loved The End of Faith so much is because Sam Harris chose a convincing point of view and supported it with compelling - even poetic - arguments. Chris Hitchens seems like he'd be fun to get a drink with, and Daniel Dennet seems like he couldn't even decide what drink to order.