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God's Debris
[Later edit: I'm amazed that I didn't give the link to the book: http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/godsdebris/ hits head. But if you hate pdf as much as I do, ask me for the html version I made instead.]
Scott (Dilbert) Adams has re-released his book God's Debris for free. Yay! I originally bought it when it was first published. I prefer ebooks, but unfortunately it was encumbered with all kinds of locks that made it pretty much impossible to use on a different computer... and of course all computers die.
The new, free release is as a .pdf file. I welcome this with mixed feelings. I'm delighted that I can re-read the book, but I despise .pdf. I spent a while last night converting the pdf to flat text and then into html. Now I have it in a form that I can happily read on any of my computers (desktop, laptop, Palm). Yay! And now I can show people this totally cool book.
I implore everybody to read this book. It is not what you think it is. It defies categorisation really. It is fictional in style, but is about reality. It is constructed as a series of short sequences that could be easily read on tram or train commutes, or in waiting rooms or short breaks.
From the introduction:
Scott (Dilbert) Adams has re-released his book God's Debris for free. Yay! I originally bought it when it was first published. I prefer ebooks, but unfortunately it was encumbered with all kinds of locks that made it pretty much impossible to use on a different computer... and of course all computers die.
The new, free release is as a .pdf file. I welcome this with mixed feelings. I'm delighted that I can re-read the book, but I despise .pdf. I spent a while last night converting the pdf to flat text and then into html. Now I have it in a form that I can happily read on any of my computers (desktop, laptop, Palm). Yay! And now I can show people this totally cool book.
I implore everybody to read this book. It is not what you think it is. It defies categorisation really. It is fictional in style, but is about reality. It is constructed as a series of short sequences that could be easily read on tram or train commutes, or in waiting rooms or short breaks.
From the introduction:
This is not a Dilbert book. It contains no humor. I call it a 132-page thought experiment wrapped in a fictional story. I'll explain the thought experiment part later.By the way, if you have already read God's Debris and liked it then you might be interested in his sequel out now, The Religion War. And you can still buy God's Debris.
God's Debris doesn't fit into normal publishing cubbyholes. There is even disagreement about whether the material is fiction or nonfiction. I contend that it is fiction because the characters don't exist. Some people contend that it is nonfiction because the opinions and philosophies of the characters might have lasting impact on the reader.
The story contains no violence, no sexual content, and no offensive language. But the ideas expressed by the characters are inappropriate for young minds. People under the age of fourteen should not read it.
The target audience for God's Debris is people who enjoy having their brains spun around inside their skulls.
After a certain age most people are uncomfortable with new ideas. That certain age varies by person, but if you're over fifty-five (mentally) you probably won't enjoy this thought experiment. If you're eighty going on thirty-five, you might like it. If you're twenty-three, your odds of liking it are very good.
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(Anonymous) 2005-12-03 11:45 pm (UTC)(link)Sounds interesting. I don't read much online, preferring print to ebooks. But I do read my PDA while pretending to exercise, so I'm always looking for something new/interesting to download on it.
urf. that was me!
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Otherwise, I have readers for word and palmreader on my little pdf.
thanks!
Sandra
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http://www.plkr.org/dl
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rm.mcgee \\(at)\\ gmail ({dot}) com
Promises to be fascinating
Adams' latest put is that he doesn't believe in ID and he's just trying to have a little fun with both sides. You can decide if you believe this or not.
The problem may be (notice how I can review Adams' book before I've even read it?) that Adams hasn't quite come to grips with the notion that people have been thinking about the relationship between god(s), humans, and the world for about 3,000 years. There's a whole class of people who do nothing but think about these issues. Chances are, some of them are complete morons, others are screaming loonies, and still others have got something smart to say about it.
Even applying Sturgeon's Law to theologians, you still end up with a bunch of folks who've said something smart about it. Pretending nobody but you can be smart about theology is a pretty sure path to justly deserved ridicule.
Now to see if I was within a million miles of what Adams actually said! ;-)
Btw, I highly recommend The Theology Program at
bible.org. No, this isn't some kind of proselytizing. You probably know by now that I'm a nontheist (i.e., somebody who doesn't see any need for God, operationally, but who isn't all bolshy about it: I might be wrong. Like an agnostic who's leaning heavily in the direction of "there ain't none"). But if you can weed out the overtly evangelical Christian stuff (something I found pretty easy to do), you'll get a solid background that doesn't ignore the fact that people have been thinking for 3,000 years about the subject.Now to actually read the book and see how big a fool I made of myself.
Re: Promises to be fascinating
His purpose is more to make people think and question themselves than to push them toward any particular belief structure. It is pretty clear that he doesn't believe in any god even though it talks a lot in the story as if some kind of god does exist. He is simply using ideas to set fire to people's nice comfortable delusions. I know for a fact that he thinks that to believe in any kind of god is "stupid" (his word, but not said in this book).
I found it a delightful book, and I am quite dismissive of the idea of a god. (Bear in mind that I also wrote a story recently that assumed that a god was a possibility. http://werple.net.au/~miriam/#stories scroll down to Grace or Grace3.)
I read a lot of people's comments who raged at this book, but most of them completely missed the point. Unlike a standard theological or philosophical text this book has no real intention of getting at the "truth". It is more aimed at unravelling the lies... often using other lies as decoys and letting you ask yourself why you can't see any difference between them. (Like the part about Einstein's description of gravity and his own one.) It is more of a 'poke the sleeping dog and see if it moves' kind of book. I loved it.
Re: Promises to be fascinating
In it he essentially proves that god doesn't exist and that the world's "holy" books were written by superstitious savages. The neat trick is that he manages to prove these things. We have become so used to people saying that you can't disprove a god that we've somehow accepted it.
Marshal Brain is a computer science teacher, has published lots of books, created the much awarded How Stuff Works (http://www.howstuffworks.com) site, and has a number of fascinating essays online about Robotic Freedom at http://marshallbrain.com