Published 3 February 20093 February 2009 · Main Posts just punishment Jeff Sparrow I’m at the best phase of a new project — the reading aimlessly stage. Am trying to think about religion and last night started reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. If you pardon the pun, it’s like the curate’s egg — good in parts. Obviously, his stuff on Darwin’s really powerful — he cuts through your unthinking acceptance of natural selection, and makes you see how powerful and shocking the theory is. Oh, and who knew Dawkins had a sense of humour? (That’s a rhetorical question — I’m sure lots of people did know.) The book’s full of irreverent, chatty little asides, and so the narrative persona is pretty endearing. On the not-so-good side, his arguments about politics and religion are way too simplistic, and he tends to see belief as simply a matter of intellectual laziness or cowardice, which doesn’t seem very helpful. Anyway, I fell asleep reading his polemic about the moral bankruptcy implicit in many accounts of an interventionist god, accounts which often justify atrocities on the basis that they serve some mysterious higher purpose (eg: God sends earthquakes because the devastation allows us to demonstrate our charity, which is nice for us but not so much for the people crushed in their houses). Then I woke up in the middle of the night tormented by mosquitoes doing that thing where they bite you and, when they’re not biting you, they buzz in your ear to let you know that they’re still hanging around waiting to bite you again. With this taking place at 4am, it was hard not to think that, as punishment for messing with Dawkins, I was getting the Job treatment (‘So went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown’). Still, as of 7am this morning, I seem to have escaped the smiting of the four corners of the house — the bit where God kills all of Job’s family as part of a bet he’s having with the devil. Jeff Sparrow Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley Award-winning writer, broadcaster and former editor of Overland. More by Jeff Sparrow › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 28 March 202428 March 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. First published in Overland Issue 228 5 March 2024 · Main Posts Andrew Charlton’s school assignment Alex McKinnon Australia's Pivot to India exists for three reasons: so that when Andrew Charlton is interviewed on the radio or introduced on Q+A, his bio includes the phrase "he has written a book about Indian-Australian relations"; to fend off accusations that he is another Kristina Keneally engaging in electoral colonialism in western Sydney; and to help the Albanese government strengthen economic and military ties with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.