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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:39
'The God of Atheists' - A Review
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing most excellently.
Thank you so much to those of you who have shown such great interest in my latest book, Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
I hugely appreciate that lots of people are interested.
You can get the PDF, the audiobook, or the hard copy from my website at freedomainradio.com.
Now, I'd like to tell you a little bit about another side of myself and hopefully get you interested in something else that I'm doing.
For those of you who don't know about my history, I actually started down my sort of professional career road originally as an actor and a playwright.
I studied for a couple of years at the National Theatre School in Canada and wrote a number of plays and acted and so on and enjoyed it thoroughly but did not find that I wanted that to be my entire life because I had all these other things, a desire for philosophy, for knowledge and also loved the business world so I spent about a decade as an for knowledge and also loved the business world so I spent about a decade as So a couple of years ago, I missed the artistic side of my life or my nature
So I dropped out of the business world and I spent about a year and a half working on...
I wrote two books and the first was a modern comedy and the second was a historical drama.
And I did this.
I wrote this book under the tutelage of a very established Canadian writer through one of Canada's most prestigious writing programs called the Humber School for Writers.
And my teacher loved the book and I got an agent based on the strength of this book called The God of Atheists and we went flogging it around a wide variety of publishers up here in Canada.
Who all loved it and said, fantastic writing, great characters, fantastic plot, but were just not interested in publishing it, which, of course, until I understood more about philosophy and people's sensitivity regarding the subject matter of the book, I found rather baffling.
You know, like, oh, great girl, fantastic girl, haughty philosopher, super genius, rich, whatever.
I just don't want to date her, right?
I mean, that was kind of baffling to me, and part of what I was doing through Freedom and Radio and through my philosophy, particularly in the realm of aesthetics, was trying to understand...
So, after I went through the process of publishing my books through Lulu, I decided to revisit The God of Atheists, which is one of my favorite books.
And I hired an editor and we worked through it and it's now available and I wanted to give you, because I'm going to say it's great, I think it's a fantastic book, but of course I'm going to think that I'm the writer.
So I wanted to read to you a review of The God of Atheists.
This was a review that was commissioned by the Humboldt School for Writers to try and understand why we were having trouble selling what everybody said was a great book.
So this is an independent review.
I didn't pay for it. It's from a very experienced, intelligent, and well-educated reviewer.
So I'm going to read this, and I hope that this will give you some desire.
To buy this novel, and I hope that it will also give you some understanding as to why it's so controversial.
So the novel is The God of Atheists.
It is available at my website at freedomainradio.com.
I've tried to make it pretty cheap.
It's fairly lengthy, 604 pages, so ordering the book is a little bit more expensive.
It's 25 bucks, I think.
But you can get the audio book...
Sorry, you can get the PDF much cheaper, and the audio book is available but only for donations to Freedom Aid Radio.
So... You can see that on my website, freedomainradio.com.
So this is the review. I hope that this will pique your interest in getting a hold of this, what I think is an amazing and beautiful book.
The God of Atheists. This is from February the 16th, 2003.
The God of Atheists by Stefan Molyneux.
What follows, since it's the reviewer, what follows will likely read...
Like a book review from an already published book.
A statement in itself.
It will also become clear how impossible it is to resist quoting passages from this novel, given the author's brilliant insights into character, wonderful literary flourishes, and stunning demonstration of what is meant by inspired writing.
To say that this novel is a tour de force is an understatement.
A publisher with savvy marketing instincts might do well to change the book title from The God of Atheists to Great Canadian Novel.
From the outset, it is worth noting that this novel is in many of its sections a demanding intellectual work.
The book's great anti-postmodernism diatribes, for example.
This is not every reader's cup of tea, but for those up for the challenge, the novel makes for a truly amazing reading experience.
A fascinating mind has crafted this work.
a strong, memorable, confident narrative voice comes through.
There appears to be no need to shorten, alter, change, or edit this manuscript in any way.
The author's frequent use of lists throughout might be enlivened with the assistance of some innovative graphic design.
That aside, get thee to a publisherie.
That's a Hamlet reference. What the novel is, in essence, is a modern-day version of the medieval morality tale, woven together from the lives of three separate families in contemporary Toronto.
That's New York North, in case you don't know.
The story unfolds as an intriguing portrait of adults corrupted by the very process of reaching adulthood, of learning patterns of behavior which gradually rule out the need for truth, integrity, honesty, fairness, and justice.
It is their respective children who call them on the carpet for their inadequacies.
Said another way, the adults are the compromised, fallen and corrupt voices of experience.
The preteens and barely teenage children, the voices of innocence, anything but naive, stand out as idealists of extraordinary, believable strength of purpose.
Adults, such as the ones depicted in The God of Atheists, might have been rendered as just scoundrels in novels of an earlier century and different locale.
There is nothing ultimately unique about the human problem with truth, integrity, honesty, fairness, and justice.
However, these particular adult characters are embedded within today's contemporary philosophical, ethical, cultural environment, an environment which fosters, supports, and justifies their conduct.
Postmodernism is its name.
Through one of the author's stellar characters, the graduate philosophy student Rudy Fisher, aka the Babelfish, the point is made that corrupt underpinnings of the culture, the postmodern, or pomo, ethos, promotes, undergirds, and reinforces relative truth, relative standards, and buffet-style morality.
This novel, as great novels do, gives the reader an entire world, but it is far more than a cursory snapshot of the times.
It speaks to the author's considerable versatility that he seamlessly works into the novel credible knowledge about the business world, its ethics, about academia, its insidious jargon and politics, about the music industry, its shadiness, the exploitation of musicians.
There are authoritative exchanges about high and low cultures, philosophical arguments, the vagaries of boy bands, computer programming, and so on.
Just by the by, this is sort of off the review, I did of course spend 10 years or more as a software executive I was started as a computer programmer.
I spent some time in graduate school.
Never been in a boy band, but you can always dream.
This author knows a lot and introduces it well, with novelistic flair, great insight, and a tremendous feel for language.
He has produced a wide-ranging thinking person's book.
So... Beginning at the beginning, what many of the opening chapters of the book come across as are strong, finely focused, self-contained short stories.
In this way, the author ingeniously introduces the reader to his three family groupings, setting up in that reader's mind well-defined characters.
Once the clarity of characters and their mindset have been established, he then establishes links between chapters and the characters within.
These are foreshadowed often by prose chapter headings, a charming touch nowadays largely replaced by numbers alone, borrowed it seems from the early history of the novel.
These titles include Stephen Grows Up, Sarah and Alice Meet Stephen, Gordon Goes to University.
What this also recalls are the text panels of silent movies where a prose line would introduce the subsequent scene.
The novel begins with the world of Alder and Joanne and their son Stephen.
The following chapter introduces Dave and Angela and their son Justin and daughter Sarah.
Al, Greta and their children Ian and Alice are set forward in the third chapter.
Terry, the young computer programmer and his world, is similarly introduced in a separate subsequent chapter.
And so forth as other characters are worked into the storyline.
With the entry of each new character comes a short story chapter to Primus for how that character may mesh or clash with the rest of the fictional landscape he or she is about to encounter.
This technique serves as a wonderful preparation for the reader during his or her long, rewarding and engaging read.
604 pages. Once the reader has fixed the full-bodied characters and their respective worlds in the reader's mind, said characters are in turn linked up through various encounters and events with other characters.
Take the example of Linkage where Stephen meets Sarah and Alice.
With a perfect pitch for dialogue, the author conveys a tremendous exchange between them, fascinating both for what is said and how the storyline is advanced.
Just by the way, I try to do that.
I take Aristotle's dictum about poetics that every event should reveal character and also move the story forward.
To return to the novel's point of conflict, this reviewer continues, these exist in several worlds, business, technology, music, and the academy.
In all these milieus, potential human weakness is further exacerbated by postmodern relativism.
The principal adult male protagonists are Dave, Sarah and Justin's father, a shady computer software developer, actually manager, who recruits and exploits Terry.
Al, Alison Ian's father, an exploitive music producer who schemes to turn a boy band into a cash cow.
Alder, Stephen's father, an unethical philosophy professor who steals the thesis proposal of a graduate student, Gordon Marrow, and promotes it as his own.
And there are some quotes from the novel which I'm going to include out of the review.
Of Alder, the novel's narrator observes...
This is a quote from the book.
Alder's failure to win over the children, especially his son, was a great sting, but it is something most parents do for themselves.
They teach their children with the lazy dominance of absolutes, and then defend their own actions with the lazy fog of relativism.
As a direct challenge to postmodern, post-feminist, post-colonialist notions that only women can write about women, minorities about minorities, etc., the author demonstrates a brilliant ability to credibly convey the minds of women, to say nothing of men and children.
The deciding factor in achieving this is, of course, talent, ingenuity, and intelligence, not gender, race, or age.
Just in case you're wondering, it's because two of the main characters are...
Twelve-year-old girls. And I did actually interview a lot of girls and so on to try and get their world, much to the alarm of their parents, but to go back to the review.
In rendering Alder's wife Joanne, her inner voice, and her dialogue, the author offers a portrait of a woman dealing with the after-effects of choice and feminist options.
Through her is exemplified both the admonition, be careful what you wish for, and the lack of conviction to prevent discarding what she once upheld.
This is a quote from the novel.
Joanne's feminism seemed to fade away, and she felt herself click into the kind of woman who could give herself to a man.
And of course there was a subjugation in that too, but it didn't matter either.
She cooked his breakfast, and there was an undertow, of course, she was quite aware of it, but strangely unashamed.
I make you eggs, you make me pregnant.
Here, as on virtually every page of the novel, the author demonstrates an unerring instinct for thoughtful, deep insights into character.
There are fascinating observations, wise conclusions drawn throughout.
This is another quote from the novel.
Joanne sensed deep pain in Alder, a kind of abstract defensiveness.
Certain defenses can become so well developed that they become the personality they were originally designed to protect.
It's true for the state as well.
To continue with the review, the author is equally gifted in the characterization of his male protagonists.
Of Alder, the narrator observes, quote, He liked her gentleness.
People usually overwhelmed Alder.
He preferred them dead and pressed like leaves in a book.
Here and everywhere in the novel are numerous eye-popping lines and phrases and passages.
This is a quote about the software entrepreneur.
Dave nimbly worked the gap between greed and knowledge.
There are knowledge workers, and then there are men like Dave, ignorance workers.
The young programmers knew nothing about business.
The investors knew nothing about software.
Dave knew little about either, but he had an instinctive feel for the negative alliances needed to keep the truth at bay.
Keep those who know the most about software far away from those who know the most about business.
Dave gave Angela all of this not out of love, but rather out of a strange kind of compulsive taxidermy.
He refused to listen to any of Angela's complaints because he gave her so much.
It is not at all unusual for such seeming generosity to be an elegant way of telling someone to shut up.
When shopaholic Angela enters her daughter Sarah's bedroom with the ultimatum to stop her incessant reading and accompany her to the mall, the exchange is rendered as follows.
You can read later, said her mother, shaking her head suddenly in the decisive gesture which said, This show of negotiation is now over.
It was as if she held a police megaphone there in the doorway.
You there! With the contented expression, put that book down!
Move away from the bed slowly!
We have you surrounded!
You will shop!
There is also the description of Sarah's replacement nanny, one with, quote, an almost complete absence of smell and fingers so rough it seemed each one was capped with a thimble.
Page after page it appears that the novel has become, for this author, an opportunity for an adventure in thought.
What stomachs do, how the body disappoints, how the mind presides over the constipated body.
On Greta, Al's wife, and the advice she receives from her doctor.
Because you have to be careful about causing lazy bowels.
This image of a pink bowel dozing in a hammock while the shit piled up in the yard almost made her doctor smile.
The rhetorical force the author often gives his least admirable characters is often astounding.
Al's diatribe on the realities of the music business has the power of a speech delivered from stage.
And those insights!
Quote, Al's ambition was never overwhelming, but what he had, he had crippled with irony.
An early reference to Al and Greta's daughter Alice.
She was part of the massive experiment underway in the modern West, particularly in North America, the replacement of child-rearing with cheerleading.
Of Alder, the corrupt philosophy professor, husband of Joanne, father of Stephen, the narrator observes, quote, The elemental pragmatism of family life was at war with his dreaminess.
All the practicality of flu shots and ball tossing and hooking heavy bookshelves to the wall and developing the disaster radar of parents with toddlers, all that leaned against his delicate mental house of cards like an insistent wind.
Of Alder's selfishness, quote, Alder placed the rudder completely in Joanne's hands.
Then went up to the crow's nest to enjoy the view.
Not fair, she thought.
Not fair! Joanne was fraying at the edges, losing herself.
In her dreams she was an Egyptian mummy, as her bandages were unwound by anthropologists.
All her sacred dust poured away.
The talent to allow a reader to enter into the mind of an adolescent who is trying to make sense of the world is no small feat for an author.
The passages relating to Stephen and his father are sheer magic.
The fate of many sons and daughters who probed too much into life, the drastic steps taken to ease despair, and the observation that Stephen could have been one of the victims yield the following.
The extent of this intergenerational biochemical war was not lost on Stephen.
It was, sadly, lost on others like him.
Stephen watched boy after boy, who, rising and flailing against indifference, was brought down by the wild jackals of amphetamines.
At one point the narrator, referring to puberty and the onslaught of male hormones as, quote, nature's first stab at creating families, is not the most subtle of onslaughts.
This great assault on the fabric of society, all the power formerly restrained by religion and trigger-happy fathers now, flows largely unimpeded.
There is a priceless exchange in the form of an advice session on big city ladies from Terry's Uncle Tommy.
Dave's outright Machiavellian exploitation of Terry, the more dangerous big city guy, is performed in perfect pitch.
Again and again, the clear-eyed observations.
Terry's father is really, really slow and sluggish, and so this is of Terry's family.
His parents had had Terry late.
His mother was in her early 40s.
In Terry's opinion, that was no indication that he was unwanted or accidental.
He firmly believed that his parents had been trying to have him since their mid-20s, since they married, in fact, but that his father's sperm, being his father's, were in no hurry.
The sperm which finally made it could have been released as long as a decade before and just took its sweet time.
You only have had to have seen my dad on the highway to understand that.
Terry's leaving for college.
His parents were a kind of still life.
It was hard to imagine loving a portrait.
At the bus station, Terry got up ten minutes before the bus had to leave and shepherded his father over to the bus bay.
Ten minutes, he thought. Yeah, that should be just enough for the handshake, which is like watching my father raise and lower a tiny bridge.
Terry introduced to Dave's wife, Angela.
Angela glanced up.
She was a short, slender blonde woman, part of the toned, mummified phalanx of rich wives.
Her body would have been the envy of a gymnast, but her face seemed like a moon map of all the world's troubles.
This was in stark contrast to Dave, whose face was youthful but whose body was going to seed.
And the graduate student Rudy Fisher, a.k.a.
the Babblefishers, demolition job on the world of academia.
The invention of words is the special playground of specialists.
Generally, specialists invent words for two reasons, to ensure exclusivity and promote insecurity.
Get enough weird sentences together, hey, you're off to a nifty conference someplace warm.
All of the pomo and slo-mo chapters are brilliant, beginning with the first.
The bite of Rudy's trenchant commentary throughout is a highlight of the novel.
On the ingenious difference between arts and engineering students, they are leer to the arts student's Nixon.
True narcissism requires an intellectual.
Engineering students build the things our society uses, and arts students destroy the foundations of that society.
Still, it is clear in the novel that Rudy is an accomplice to a crime, enabling the graduate students he tutors to upshift their language to POMO, or postmodernism, in order to gain degrees, to publish, not perish.
He acknowledges as much with particular force in the superb chapter entitled The Babblefish Speaks.
A quote from the novel.
I know, it's all a kind of shell game.
And I need to spend every waking hour cursing, spitting on and undermining my culture, in the hopes of being paid a middle-class salary to teach those who come after me to do the same.
We are a cancer on the throat of the modern world.
We have invented a language through which we cannot be detected.
We have swarmed the halls of academia, camping in the highest places of thought in our cluttered and twisted tent cities.
As the novel progresses, Salvos and the war between the forces of experience and innocence begin in earnest, with Ian questioning his father, Al, on his business practices.
"'Corruption breeds corruption,' he tells him.
Stephen, at a later point, tells his father, Alder,"'Dad, I think you are pretending to teach something that you do not understand.' And Joanne's response to her son,"'My son is a moralist?' Joanne shuddered, then grinned suddenly.
I mean, the word is sort of a joke, isn't it?
A right-wing conspiracy?
She felt a titanic drying of her tears.
She was a water planet on the edge of a supernova.
A great black wave of cynicism rolled over her raw heart like thick oil over a skinned seal pup.
He cries in the night because the world is imperfect?
No. He cries in the night because you are imperfect.
In the end, the novel is faithful to the biblical consequences inherent in a good morality tale.
And I won't go any further because I think that's long enough.
But this is a great book, and it's not a matter of pride for me.
I mean, I did work very hard on it and so on, but please order this book.
I really strongly urge you to order this book, to get a hold of a copy.
Again, if you can't afford it, if you want to get it now, but you're not getting your pay for another couple of weeks...
Send me an email. There's a form just under contact at freedomainradio.com.
I will send you a free PDF copy.
I really, really urge you to read this book.
I think it's a beautiful book.
I think it's a passionate book.
I think it's a powerful book.
I think it's a harrowing book, although it is supposed to be a sort of comedy, because it does talk about comparing those around us to the moral standards that they portray as virtuous, as good.
And that is a harrowing process.
And so I hope, I hope, I hope that you will take this opportunity to get a hold of this book.
I think it's a nice change from the philosophy that we've been talking about.
And this is philosophy in action.
You know, if you really like this conversation, this philosophical conversation that's going on at Free Domain Radio, and I think it's a fantastic and amazing conversation in some ways, the like of which has not been seen since the days of ancient Athens, simply because of the technology that allows us all to connect in such a powerful way.
If you really like this conversation, but you can't get people interested in philosophy, buy a copy of this book and read it over.
And if you like it and if you think it's powerful, hand it to them.
And then if they're interested in the way that I approach these sorts of questions from a dramatic standpoint, it may be a good avenue for getting them involved in a philosophical conversation.
That really, of course, was one of the reasons that I put forward this book.
Stories have an amazing power in the human mind in a way that syllogisms just don't.
So, again, the book is available.
It's pretty cheap. Freedominradio.com.
If you can't afford it but you want it, just send me a note.
If you buy it and don't like it, I'll give you your money back.
Whatever it takes. Again, it's always the case, right?
I'm not trying to become... A millionaire here, but whatever it takes to get this book out there, I think it's a beautiful and powerful enough book that I will put anything that I can behind it to get it into your hands.
So please order the book, download it.
The audiobook is available, but you have to donate to Freedom Aid Radio for that.
That's just something I'm keeping in reserve as a special gift for those who really help in the advertisements of this site and this conversation and getting the word out there.
Donations always welcome.
And perhaps you'd like to drop by the board and say hi if you haven't.
We have almost 1,500 people there who are fans of the show and of philosophy, all debating the most wonderful and interesting stuff.
So thank you again, as always, so, so much for watching and supporting this conversation.
And please let me know what you think of my novel, The God of Atheists.
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