The God Delusion

I recently completed the "God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins

He writes brilliantly and he has inspired me to read the entire Bible, not just the familiar bits, - I wonder how long it will take ?

Three issues have been on my mind today -

1. The knighting of Salman Rushdie by the queen and the subsequent protests from Pakistan, Iran and Iraq.
2. The 100th day in captivity of BBC journalist Alan Johnston
3. George Bush's latest stem cell research veto

People with a strong faith, Christian, Islamic, Jewish or any other should be able and willing to defend their ideas, in deed and in debate, without bannings, death threats or other forms of intimidation. An Omnipotent God doesn't need any earthly protection from competing ideas.

Apart from the obvious attack on creationism and the literal interpretation of the bible Dawkings makes the following points

• We don't get our morals from religion - What is morally acceptable today has changed so much in the last 2000 years while the Bible and Koran and remained the same. We just pick and choose those parts of the Bible and/or Koran that are convenient.

• It is problematic to defend the belief that science governs the physical world while God governs the spiritual world and that there is NO interaction. The problem stems from the belief that God responds to prayer and intervenes in physical matters. Science should be able to detect such interventions yet it has not found any such evidence even when it has tried.
  

I would be interested to know what other people make of the book.