This book gives an insight on all the religious conflicts in our modern world from the point of view of an intellectual. The target audience of this book is atheists. A great read for intelligentsias.
Different religious institutions have given us different primitive concepts of God. We can look into many conflicts in our world through the lenses of intellect and knowledge. Plain Denial of those primitive religious concepts is not sufficient for truly educated modern people. The 21st century is giving us different challenges and we are living in the post-Christian civilization’s world. If you are an educated atheist, than to deny religious views in contemporary world is not sufficient for an ideology. Denial is not an ideology. Atheism as aggressive plain denial has been a part of Bolshevik’s ideology, but after the “fermentation” of the minds of Soviet people after Russian revolution Bolshevik’s leaders didn’t find anything better, then to take moral rules from Bible and to call them “New Soviet Morals”. So, for atheist thinkers it is insufficient to only deny religion. We need to focus on the moral aspects of atheism. We need discussions. Our Judeo-Christian Civilization is standing in a cross section of many roads. Where should we go? We need discussions between the intellectual elite of our society. Some people would say, that we have civil laws and that “we don’t need anything else”. I disagree with this idea. First of all, laws can be changed. If the majority of people will decide that something is good and ethical, than law will be changed accordingly. In Nazi Germany, laws were changed according to what people thought was ethical. The same happened in Bolshevik’s Russia, Khomeini’s Iran etc. We need books like Peter Klein’s book “Beyond God” to reflect and discuss the ways we can develop our society. I personally disagree with several things in this book, but it doesn’t change my whole perception of this book. We need discussions on these topics. Otherwise, one day, we may wake up in a strange, totalitarian country.
In addition to this, we need moral boundaries unrelated to religion. All of the moral boundaries of Western civilization (Judeo-Christian) are based on the moral laws of the Bible (Tora). This book was written in a free western country (not in Iran) and we have to understand that atheist intellectuals of Islamic nations can only freely say what they are thinking in free western countries. That is why, I would say that this book is for “Judaeo-Christian atheists”. To be honest, majority of famous atheists are from Christian countries (maybe except Salman Rushdie). I think, we can categorize this book with books written by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. This book is a good method of explaining that we don’t have religious reasons for war.
At times, when Elon Musk is building his private space program there are some people with primitive representation of the world similar to "Flat Earth”. Elon Musk had showed that one thinking personality can change the history of humankind.
So, the questions are: Are you on the side of people like Elon Musk, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Or on side of people like Khomeini? Do you want the generation of our kids to build a colony on Mars, or do you want them to cover the faces of women and make female genital mutilation operations? Do you want countries to spend money on funding cancer and disease research, or on “religious police”? YOU have to decide.
This is a great book for discussion with friends or book club meetings.