First off, this might be obvious, but if you're not fairly interested in the subject, this is likely to be a pretty dull experience.

Now for the actual book. I think Dennett did a very fine job dissecting all his reasoning, and then come to his final verdicts, perhaps, too good a job. While reading I felt a bit bored for the first 250 or so pages, which is quite a chunk of the book, and only then, do the more interesting stuff start. I could use a little more conclusions and opinions in the first part of the book, even if he would put something forward, and then explain himself after, just to make the blood boil or raise the heartbeat.

Apart from that I think a lot of what he said seems pretty natural and self explanatory, but that might just be me (I'm not raised religious, and I live in one of the most secular countries in the world, which might be why).

My rating on the book is based on these things and on the fact that I can't help but compare it a little bit to The God delusion (R. Dawkins), God is not great (C. Hitchens) and The end of fate (S. Harris), which I've all read within the last two years. I feel the four books cover a lot of the same ground, perhaps not in the conclusions they make, but in the reasons they present. And with this in mind I feel this is the least interesting of the four.

If however, you're religious and want to know more about the whole atheist deal and why a lot of people think like that, without having someone yell and halfway insult you, this is likely to be a better choice than Hitchens or Dawkins, since this have a fairly gentle feel to it, and it doesn't put out provocative statements without explaining itself in a decent manner first. This however, is my take on it, of cause.

He brings up a valid point on scientific means of investigating religion. But it's a hard read. It is, after all, written by a philosopher, and as such, each and every nuance is carefully based upon, and built upon, each preceding argument. There is a lot of back and forth, and make sure to keep an extra bookmark in the appendices. The only gripe I have is that his thesis will probably never reach fruition.

Whoever would have guessed the pineapple had such an interesting history. It's early association with the explorations of new worlds and the wonder of new new tastes and the marvels of an expanding concept of geography made it tremendously appealing to the royalty and the rich of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. No costs were spared to possess, and indeed to cultivate this amazing and delicate treasure. Although a bit over informed by the end of the book I was, never-the-less entertained by the stories of this fruit's conquest of the west.

Breaking The Spell by Daniel C. Dennett 2006 Penguin Group

Ok some people are just smart. And sometimes it is so gratifying to find that a smart person has put into words the way you have felt all along. And done it to rigorous academic standards. Thank you Daniel Dennett for writing this book.

"Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" examines religion from a dispassionate, biological, evolutionary perspective. It asks readers to put aside all emotional filters and look at the subject objectively, from the vantage of the present going back to the beginnings of religion once humans began developing speech. In the beginning was the word", he explains. But actually Dennet brings us much further back to the origins of life itself and the forces that allowed and encouraged it's survival. Religion must be viewed as a choice life made to carry for some kind of advantage it provided for survival. From these elementary beginnings Dennet follows the evolution of religion, of faith and of spirituality through the ages. Throughout Dennett challenges the reader to examine what is belief and what is belief in belief.

I found this book exhilarating. It is very well written and only occasionally did I find myself having to reread a page or two to keep up with him. But that's my problem. What I mean to say is that the book is accessible to the lay reader. It is full of compelling stories, illumination, compassion and surprise. I feel smarter for having read it. I want everyone to read it.

"...modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." Dawkins

"What these people have realized is one of the best secrets of life: Let your self go. If you can approach the world's complexities, both it's glories and it's horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural."

I can't recommend this highly enough. This is not an anti-religion screed at all, but comes at the topic of religion as a naturally emerging aspect of humanity in a thoughtful, funny, accessible way. It is "New Atheist" only in that it calls for open questioning and research of religion and its utility (and it's written by an atheist).

time to break this spell

3.5, but rounded up to 4. Found it to be a bit of a slog, especially the first half, which had me picking it up and putting it down for months. He presents some interesting ideas here, and chapter 10 is the apex for me. I would consider Dennett firmly in fourth place among the neo-atheist “Four Horsemen,” and would be very interested in a revised edition some 15 years after its first printing. He ultimately is much more optimistic in his outlook relative to the actual 2022 religious/political climate (nightmare?), yet the task of holding religions to a rigorous, objective standard remains as important as ever.

As people who read books on evolutionary theory will know, mice sometimes exhibit bizarre behavior, fearlessly walking into the waiting jaws of cats. They do this because they have been infected by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which can only reproduce in a cat's digestive tract; the mouse's behavior is thus adaptive, not for the mouse, but rather for the parasite. Dennett uses this as his starting point when discussing the nature of religion. Maybe religions are like T. gondii: they are self-reproducing patterns of human behavior ("memes"), which take over their hosts and make them carry out acts whose main purpose is to further spread the meme. To Dennett, the religious martyr is like a mouse whose brain has been modified by T. gondii.

If you are yourself religious, the above may leave you feeling angry and disappointed with the author. This is perhaps not the best reaction, since Dennett (I think, anyway) is genuinely trying to understand the nature of religion without judging it. To him, the meme theory is the only one that makes scientific sense, and throughout the book he stresses that it in no way implies that religion-memes would necessarily harm their hosts. As he says, our bodies contain trillions of non-human cells, many of which are essential to our survival. Religions may be deadly parasites like T. gondii; but they could equally well be as vital to human well-being as our intestinal flora, without which we would be unable to digest our food. And although a Christian will probably be unhappy to hear Christianity called a mind-virus, she may be more willing to stick that label on Scientology or one of the Pacific cargo cults. As long as it isn't a religion you feel any personal affinity with, it does rather seem to make sense; once you're prepared to agree with that, you may reluctantly admit that the distaste and anger you feel when the reasoning is applied to your own religion could just be the meme defending itself. Evidently, an adaptation which discouraged believers from even considering arguments against their religion would be fitness-increasing.

Dennett's basic thesis seems perfectly reasonable to me as a starting point for further investigation, but I was disappointed that the greater part of the book was extremely speculative; as evolutionary theorists like to say, it mostly consisted of "just-so stories". Yes, religious ceremonies may have evolved because they improved fidelity of meme-copying, and religions may initially have increased the fitness of the populations that practiced them by helping people make difficult decisions or making them more receptive to medicinal hypnosis; but it seemed to me that these ideas created almost as many difficulties as they resolved, and were not well-supported by empirical data. On the other hand, Dennett is a philosopher, not a scientist, and his business is more to ask questions than to answer them. If he's managed to get people thinking about these issues, maybe he's done all that can be reasonably expected of him.

I could end here, but there is one point I kept thinking about that I just have to mention. Dennett discusses religion from a scientific point of view, and cannot avoid the obvious question: maybe science is just another religion? He claims that it isn't, since science is based on empirical analysis of data while religion is not, but I was not entirely satisfied with his response. A scientist's attachment to any particular theory may not be religious; but what about the scientific world-view itself? Why, exactly, should we use facts and rational debate to resolve disagreements? I've just been reading through the Dialogues of Plato, which (at least in my view) constitute one of the important founding documents for the modern scientific outlook. Socrates, a highly sympathetic character, takes nothing for granted and questions everything. He duly dies for his beliefs, and it is hard not to think of him as a kind of martyr to rationality. Why, exactly, is he different in kind from other religious martyrs, except that he is supporting the belief system that I personally happen to like?

Aaaargh, Dennett's somehow got me playing his game... I think I've been infected by the religion-as-meme meme! Didn't he say something about welcoming a response? These philosophers are so damn tricky...
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It's hard to stop thinking about this book. If Dennett is on the right track, I wondered what other memes there might be that propagated in ways similar to those for religions; to me, the ones that seem to fit best are language, music and poetry. They're all things that spread well and demand extremely faithful copying: as Dennett says, pretty much a sine qua non for a successful meme. But how are these different patterns related? How did the meme-copying adaptation arise, and what memes was it originally being used to transmit? Is it possible that all of these memes started off as the same thing, and only split apart later?

It would be nice to come up with some way to find empirical data...
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People curious about T. gondii may find this article interesting.

A great book, maybe sometimes too talkative and contains numerous repetitions, which, I think, takes into account the habits of the American reader (several times and slowly) but reads well. I especially recommend to those who are open to dialogue with believers and discussion without conversion.

This is an overwhelmingly pithy and substantive book. At least for me. I can’t really summarize it in a way that does it justice or even feels adequate. I certainly will be processing it for some time to come. Here’s just one tiny take on the first chapter (or so) which sets up the premise of the book.

When I first encountered the original (read: evolutionary, Dawkinsian) idea of a meme it spread through my mind cascading down to even the smallest idea and reshaping everything with this new understanding. All of my critical thinking began revolving around the idea of memes as an analogy to to genes. It became my way of unlocking a deeper layer of what was happening and thus helping me begin to make sense of the confusing world of culture in the USA circa 2020. In Breaking the Spell Daniel Dennett relies heavily on the idea of memes (not in the funny internet photo/video/caption sense but as a bit of information that spreads itself through cultural means similarly to how a gene is a bit of information that spreads itself through biological means) as a way of examining various aspects of religion (including its benefits, history, possible origins, etc) and his extensive philosophical understanding of the process of Darwinian evolution is indispensable here; it provides the penetrating lens (with necessary depth and scope) to thinking about and understanding religion as something as natural in the physical world as an apple falling from a tree.

Dennett says in the initial chapter that, “religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about.” My only previous knowledge of Daniel Dennett was that he was one of the (self-defined) “four atheists of the apocalypse” and my preconceived notion that he had it out to get any and all theists. This is not the case. Dennett seeks to pull everyone into the conversation in order to better understand religion as a natural phenomenon. Playing devil’s advocate (or something of that ilk) he asks, “Wouldn’t such an exhaustive and invasive examination damage the phenomenon itself? Mightn’t it break the spell? That is a good question, and I don’t know the answer. Nobody knows the answer.” He later argues that religion offers many people legitimate benefits but it also causes several severe detriments to those same (or other) people and society. We owe it to ourselves —our collective and individual health (mental, physical, etc)— and to society to at least try to understand religion as a natural phenomenon. Not examining it (because of taboo or other reasons) will not be helpful for us as we move into the future.

We examine “sports as a natural phenomenon or cancer as a natural phenomenon. Both… are widely recognized as [such]…” Yet, humans have been mostly unwilling to examine religion in such a manner. Dennett begins by explaining why this might be the case and calls theists and apologists to try to demonstrate their reasons scientifically. “If [religion] isn’t entirely natural, if there really are miracles involved, the best way—indeed, the only way—to show that to doubters would be to demonstrate it scientifically. Refusing to play by these rules only creates suspicion that one doesn’t really believe that religion is supernatural after all.” In other words, a lot of non-religious people (a majority?) will scoff at short-circuited answers to questions they find deeply curious; they want theists to at least try as hard as they can to apply the scientific process to try to answer curious questions like what causes “miracles.” Refusing to try only delegitimizes their religion as uncourageous and/or unethical in regards to humanity.

Instead of stooping (intellectually) to untestable claims and simple adherence to deep-rooted religious ideas that disincentive critical examination of that religion as legitimately supernatural (such as sacrilege, taboo, guilt, shame, sin, or eternal punishment) theists should be willing and active in pursuing the explanation of their religion’s tenets and miracles. Theists who rest on (read: hide behind) their certainty of supernatural ideas without willingness to critically examine them only demonstrate one of Dennett’s main points: their unwillingness to question what they believe has opened them up to certain memes. Memes which can “act” like viruses— blurring the line between agency and non-agency— and “act” in ways in which are beneficial to themselves. Through selective process (both intentional and unintentional) the ideas that are good at spreading and defending themselves tend to persist. This persistence, spreading, and evolving of an idea is the life of a meme. In the case of religion, the unwillingness to critically examine itself and its origins as anything but supernatural evolved as a meme through the help of buttressing ideas like sacrilege, taboo, guilt, shame, sin, and eternal punishment all of which disincentivize the participating humans (hosts) from critically examining those ideas. It is an adapted (evolved) protection mechanism for the sake of the meme. Basically, a meme evolves over time, in this case, developing (through selection) into a specific idea that disincentivizes a person from critically examining that very idea in order to continue to exist and benefit the greater/bigger meme of that specific religion. In other words, ideas like sacrilege and taboo within religion can act as a protective spell to keep theists from joining in such an honest and humble examination. They are, then, unwittingly acting on behalf of the meme much the same as a creature can unwittingly act on behalf of a parasite.

Like I said, this is really just the first chapter or so. The book covers so much (and yet not nearly enough). It is not without its flaws. But the analogy of memes and the idea of memetic evolution in everything cultural, specifically religion, acts as a fascinating lens and gives the reader much to chew on throughout this fascinating, provocative, and honest book.

Like I said initially, for me this is an overwhelmingly pithy and substantive book. If you have a curiosity for (and interest in) religion’s existence and you also tend to think about things in terms of cause and effect, cost-benefit analyst, slow and incremental change, the reasons why things are the way they are— that is, in terms of evolution as a process (not simply restricted to biology)— you, too, will probably find this book to be overwhelmingly pithy and substantive. Perhaps even monumental.

هذا الكتاب ليس كغيره من كتب الإلحاد المعاصر، فهو لم يقدم كتابه كعالم بايولوجيا، ولا كعالم أعصاب، ولا كصحفي سياسي، بل كفيلسوف يحاول فهم طبيعة الدين.

يحاول دينيت أن يوضح لنا، أن الدين ليس خارجا عن المنهجية العلمية لفهمه ودراسته، وأن التسليم بالماورائيات ليست مسلمات، بل هي بداية الطريق للنقاش.

يعتمد دينيت على التحليل الاجتماعي والتطور الدارويني لفهم وتفسير سلوكيات المؤمنين والجماعات الدينية.

الكتاب رائع ويستحق القراءة، وقد ترجمت الدار الليبرالية الكتاب للعربية، يمكن الحصول عليه من موقع نيل والفرات.

An important book with interesting insights into why people believe the unbelievable, but at times I felt like I was reading a text book. I'd recommend this book to anyone who want to better understand why bronze age religions still have such a strong hold on the minds of a large portion of their families and friends.

This book is a little bit wordy, but one should expect that when they pick up a book written by a philosopher. There are some interesting thoughts in this book but I feel like it could have been a bit shorter.