A Trip to the Candy Store!

I love the book store. I could spend all day every day in a book store just looking at all the beautiful, wonderful books. There are large books, thin books, classy books, classless books, expensive, hard-to-read tomes, and vapid, pointless, mind-numbing tabloidal fodder all mixed into one giant, splendid panoply of color, odor, and excitement. I sometimes can just stop and breathe in the atmosphere of a thousand worlds and know that the only place in which this strange heterogeneous vapor might be savored in exactly this way . . . is the book store (or maybe a library, but who's counting). That's why I call it a trip to the candy store.

For Father's day I got a gift certificate to Barnes & Nobles and this is what I bought: (drum roll, please)

Dragons: The Greatest Stories - edited by Martin H. Greenberg
I find dragon stories irresistible. In fact, I'm reading a rather famous one to my younger son right now. See side bar.











The God Delusion - by Richard Dawkins
Dawkins is a vociferous, fire-breathing atheist out to save the world from religion. This one should be fun.











Dawkins' God--Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life - by Alister E. McGrath
McGrath is a fellow Oxford University professor with Dawkins and this was the first major book written to refute Dawkins' rantings. It should be good.











The Dawkins Delusion?--Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine - by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath
A collaboration between Professor McGrath and his wife, this volume picks apart The God Delusion (I think), demonstrating the irony of Dawkins' hatred for Christian 'fundamentalism' by showing how he acts almost exactly like what he condemns, only from the opposite viewpoint.

I have to admit I gained a fascination for Dawkins after seeing the previously-posted-about Ben Stein flick Expelled and I cannot wait to read his book. He seems to me a somewhat eccentric character and I am always attracted to those. I also want to learn more of the arguments used by elitists in the intellectual community who claim that reason proves there is no God. I have always found the opposite to be true. Reason points to an uncaused First Cause. The idea that matter is eternal is ludicrous to me. There was a time and place when it came into being. Plus, I love a good argument, so off we go.