02.03.06
Breaking Dennett’s Spell
I broke down and got my copy of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and almost immediately regretted not buying instead Dever’s Did God Have A Wife? on a nearby shelf.
Dennett’s book is almost dreadfully bad, devoid of content, just a rehash of the kind of Darwinian-secularist jargon rehashed into what appears to be an account of the evolution of religion, although that never really happens in the book.
The book just spins out a set of abstractions and never even bothers to examine the history of religions as we know them. Obviously Dennett is afraid to look at that history, and finds it safer to spin just so stories about how religion might have ‘evolved’ in the Paleolithic.
This book wouldn’t even be worth commenting one save that it will have a considerable influence, no doubt.