I've got three things on the burner that have made the most interesting combination. You know how sometimes you just get lucky by happening to be reading something that has something to do with something else, albeit unintentionally, and given the juxtaposition you just get a different perspective.

To start, I just blew through Dawkins' latest pulp: The God Delusion. Admittedly, I am a complete aetheist. You guys knew that, right? Anyway, eight years of catholic grade school down the drain, except for the skirts. Dawkins' is hardly soft spoken on the matter, and actually may be doing the new aetheist' movement a disservice by being so passionate about his work. For those unfamiliar with Dawkins here is a quick drive-by: evolutionary biologist that breaks ground in analyzing the genes as a building block of evolutionary processes. Not genetics mind you, but how the cumulative effect of genetics may be the driving force behind Darwinism. Instead of the competing organisms of Darwin, Dawkins sees competing genes. With that, he takes it a step further and suggests that genes are responsible for mental recipes for what he calls memes, or thoughts or behaviors that can be transfered through culture. Basically, your genetics give you a brain that is capable of a certain behavior. That behavior is transferred to others like you, and since it happens to be an idea that is advantageous to your species' survival, like manogamy, culture who practice it may fair better than those who do not. Got that?

In The God Delusion, Dawkins turns that spotlight on religions. He contends that humans have developed a set of memes that are advantageous to our initial survival. Ancestral humans may have benefitted from things like: our inherent ability to interpret intentions of other animals; open belief/trust of elder generations by the younger, etc. So for instance, when early humans saw a predator they quickly learned to do two things: estimate its intentions and predict its behavior, tell others from your pack your experiences. Those that listened absolutely were better off than those who did not. The tiger will most likely not eat you unless you do this or that; the bison tend to round up easily, even if you head them towards a cliff; your kids can benefit from this type of knowledge by not wasting time investigating it too much, and spending time on other things we haven't figured out yet.

Given that, those memes make us susceptible to other by-products, namely religion. Really quickly: tribal people tended to personify inanimate objects - hey once you've got those cats figured out, why not give us your take on the mountains and the fire? They may have also associated meanings to things that were not accurate, but not a disadvantage either. And, they were able to transfer these understandings to future generations. That is the recipe for all religions, from polytheism worship of the sun-god, to the monotheistic worship of St. Joseph and his inherent ability to influence real estate sales when buried upside down facing away from the house in your backyard. Dawkins is brilliant.

The book goes through modern arguments for religion and the belief of a supreme being like a band-saw. For example, he states that the declaration that scriptures are the basis for moral evaluation is complete non-sense. And I totally agree, by the way. If modern day people are allowed to interpret ancient texts and draw their own conclusions on what is relevant to today and what is not, what meter stick are they implementing to make those decisions? Whatever it may be, it had to be in place before those texts were written otherwise we would have no idea that it is bad to sacrifice your own siblings, or gang rape women.

Of course, along the way there is an amount of stumping that Dawkins does. It is hard to argue with the guy. He tends to treat the three majors religions equally bad, and for the most part shys away from politics. He makes his case against the current administration, and the perceived religious-right movement in America and moves on. That's not the point of the book. He also does this dissection at the end that is quite powerful. In an effort to open consciousness, he mentions that humans are built to operate in a certain space, with things that don't move too quickly, or slowly, aren't too small or two big, etc., from a ball point pen to a mountain, a snail to a fastball. When things move outside of those parameters we tend to lose our inherent understanding of them. Sure we cab build a particle accelerator and map out the collisions like clockwork. But that requires a great departure from our quite comfortable billiard table. As that applies to things like quantum physics, we may find that the way things operate at that level is completely the opposite of what we expect from our perspective of not-to-this or that. To illustrate: we know that the atomic structure is such that a proportionate model would place the nucleous in the center of a football stadium and the orbiting electrons in the upper seats - each atom. That makes everything we touch empty space, basically. But that hunk of steel sure feels like a lot more than that when you pick it up. It might be that our senses, our finger tips, is doing it's best to interpret quantum mechanics. Magnetic forces keep the atoms intact and push and pull them towards or away from others, we feel that as hard, heavy steel.

If we are able to make that kind of a leap in thinking, why do we insist on pushing the proverbial goal-post back and insist on retaining the idea of a god, once a man with a white beard in a cloud, now an intelligent designer?