Godless: The Church of Liberalism
by Ann Coulter
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Book Reviews of Godless: The Church of Liberalism
Book Review: Where mean becomes average
Summary: 1 Stars
Ann Coulter's stock-in-trade is the tiresome kind of hypercontentious political patter in which meanness sometimes passes for humor. The overall theme of "Godless" likens liberalism to a religion in the sense that certain principles are taken on faith and declared inviolate, whether or not they are justified by actual facts and circumstances. Although it must have occurred to Coulter that her own faith (Christianity) is burdened by a much older, more pervasive, and far more historically harmful version of the same problem, she elected not to mention such an inconvenient truth.
For readers more interested in science than in politics, the book begins to perk up (though rather perversely) in chapters 8 through 11, where Ms. Coulter proudly underscores her belief in divine creation and proceeds to hold forth on evolution. Calling on her training as a lawyer, she adopts the strategy of flatly denying nearly every aspect of evolution in order to force initial seeds of doubt into the pliable minds of the jurors. At the same time she reveals her own scientific naivete by adopting "Darwinism" and "Darwiniacs" as terms of derision for evolution and evolutionists, respectively. This is like branding people who calculate orbits as "Newtonists" or labeling lighting engineers as "Edisonists." Critics need to understand that evolution has steadily progressed from a speculative hypothesis to a foundational theory underlying all aspects of biology. It no longer depends on the ideas of any one person, and would be well established even if Charles Darwin had never been born. (The independent work of Alfred Russel Wallace alone guarantees that point.)
Coulter has managed to misunderstand many things about evolution, but I think her most basic disconnect is the deeply mistaken notion that evolution must be wrong because it requires the random occurrence of large, wildly improbable leaps in the development of organisms. People who cling to this view seem oblivious to evolution's two core rationales. First, the random part of the process is the inevitable occurrence of minor copying errors or other anomalies in the genomes of germ cells (sperm and eggs). This is a relatively benign source of small variations that reach beyond the normal gene shuffling inherent in sexual reproduction. The second and distinctly non-random part is natural selection, which governs whether a given modification is, over time, incorporated into the "standard" genome for the organism. Changes tending, on average, to enhance survival and reproduction are automatically preserved.
Natural variation and selection are, when you think about them, nothing more than what would happen anyway, and therein lies the disarming simplicity which seems to confound evolution's opponents. We know the basic process works because, for example, breeders who substitute accelerated artificial selection for natural selection have managed to transform wolves into everything from Great Danes to Chihuahuas in rather short order. When a reproducing group is split and isolated for a sufficiently long time, enough change occurs to impede and then preclude mating between the subgroups, and one species becomes two. Why don't we see this in progress? We do -- the incomplete breeding success of horses with donkeys and lions with tigers demonstrates it. Over some 3.8 thousand million years of geologic time (another hard-to-grasp concept) it is not at all implausible that the awesome, stunning array of life we see on Earth could have evolved from the simplest bacterial beginnings.
As an alternative, Coulter smugly offers the contradictory, scientifically empty and cosmologically confused Genesis myth. Seriously now, wouldn't forty years in the desert have been long enough for the supposed designer to give his chosen people, with their fully modern Homo sapiens brains, at least a few correct clues about the arrangement of the solar system and the millions of millennia over which Earth and its complement of living things gradually matured?
It is worth noting that evolution itself doesn't teach anything definitive about the origin of life, being concerned only with the differentiation of species once systematic reproduction has been achieved. Yet extreme contrarians like Coulter leap almost compulsively to the conclusion that acceptance of evolution implies rejection of any kind of divine intervention. Not so, and there surely is room for a coherent, peer-reviewed theory detailing why intelligent assistance was necessary and how (other than by magic) it might have been implemented. In the meantime, science has already shown that living things are made of the same atoms and obey the same physical and chemical rules as inanimate matter. Indeed, at the level of viruses it becomes hard to tell what is alive and what isn't.
Among her efforts to demolish the reader's confidence in evolution, Coulter turns to the peppered moth study in which insect coloration was observed to change (evolve) in a way that reduced predation when industrial pollution darkened tree trunks. She proceeds, characteristically I'm afraid, by repeating allegations of fraud without doing enough homework to see that the research was really quite solid. For example, the supposedly damning charge that moths were fastened to trunks for some photos evaporates when one finds that the fastening was done simply to get light and dark specimens together in the same picture. It had nothing to do with the content or conclusions of the investigations. Similarly, the author attempts to dismiss the transitional fossil Archaeopteryx (a small dinosaur with feathered wings) by claiming that it may not be a DIRECT ancestor of birds. Doesn't that amount to rather weak and ungenerous carping in response to a prime example of the evolutionary blending she derides as largely fictitious?
On the vitally important subjects of how nature works and how life developed, those whose faith-based views offer nothing beyond naive assertions and arbitrary guesses inevitably find themselves reduced to criticizing (and in Coulter's case, ridiculing and excoriating) the workers whose thinking and research, however imperfect and incomplete, have actually contributed something plausible and useful. I give this book a minimal one star rating because the author, by willfully surrendering her considerable intellect to an ugly case of ideological paralysis, has earned it.
Book Review: Love you, Ann, but you missed the mark with this one
Summary: 2 Stars
Ann Coulter is such a lightning rod personality, regardless of my opinion of `Godless,' about half the review readers will agree that the review is "Helpful" and the other half will pull the lever for "Not Helpful." Unfortunately, the feedback from other book buyers will not necessarily be representative of whether my review was helpful. Rather, those who like Coulter may likely have one view of my opinion and those who dislike her will have the opposite opinion.
So it goes.
I want to start by saying for the record that I like Ann Coulter. I think she is extremely intelligent. She is fearless. She has a strong but affable personality. She is attractive. Much more often than not, I find myself on the same side of the issue as she is. In fact, I thought "How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must)" was inspired. It was poignant. It was funny. That being said, I was more than a little disappointed by `Godless.'
The first few chapters of `Godless' begins with the same sharp wit and rational analysis as `How To Talk To A Liberal.' With examples of double-talk, duplicity, and stupidity, Coulter argues that Democrats in the United States have adopted Liberalism as a religion complete with its own doctrine, martyrs, sacraments, and clergy. Coulter's metaphors are hilarious and dead ba11s-on.
For example, Coulter compares the 1988 campaign issue of Michael Dukakis' furlough program, specifically Willie Horton as the martyr in the Church of Liberalism. "But, when the inevitable happened and Dukakis did lose the election, Democrats went to work creating a myth that the Bush campaign had won the election with a racist ad campaign about a black criminal named Willie Horton. Liberals have an unparalleled capacity to create a myth when the truth will destroy them. The Willie Horton ad provoked hysteria from the Democrats because Horton's release exposed their obsessive fetish with releasing violent criminals. In fact, Horton is the full explanation for why someone like Michael Dukakis should never be allowed near any government job..."
Relating to the Liberals' "Doctrine of Infallibility," according to Coulter, is the exploitation of women, specifically sobbing women. "After 9/11, four housewives from New Jersey whose husbands died in the attack on the World Trade Center became heroes for blaming their husbands' deaths on George Bush and demanding a commission to investigate why Bush didn't stop the attaches. The Jersey Girls weren't interested in national honor, they were interested in a lawsuit. The first came together to complain that the $1.6 million average settlement to be paid to 9/11 victims' families by the government was not large enough.." "After getting their payments jacked up, the weeping widows took to the airwaves to denounce George Bush, apparently for not beaming himself through space from Florida to New York and throwing himself in front of the second building at the World Trade Center." "The whole nation was wounded, all of our lives reduced. But they (The Jersey Girls) believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony."
Then, as if a switch had been flipped, Coulter uses the well-formed foundation for her opinion, not unlike a member of a high school debate team that drew the short side of the argument, takes the side of creationism, or "intelligent design," as opposed to the Theory of Evolution, to explain the how-we-got-here question. In other words, because Democrats have adopted Liberalism as their religion, does it necessarily follow that evolution is not how single-cellular organisms progressed and culminated in the human being? Well, that's Coulter's opinion, or at least that is the opinion she espouses in the second half of `Godless.'
Like an attorney building her case, Coulter makes a series of points to support her argument. For example, evolution is actually just a theory; it is not provable. Specifically referring to mutation, which is a basic premise of the theory of evolution, Coulter asserts, "the first mutations toward a nose would just make you look funny and no one would want to reproduce with you." Coulter refers to the idea of "survival of the fittest" as a tautology, or a circular and unprovable argument. "Through a process of natural selection, the `fittest' survive. Who are the `fittest?' The ones who survive! Why look - it happens every time!" Coulter continues down this path, inserting a humorous metaphor, a Walkman "evolved" into an iPod, and highlighting frauds perpetrated by unscrupulous scientists upon whose "discoveries" the Theory of Evolution was built. (While unscrupulous scientists have always existed and have always cooked the books for their own personal and professional advancement, their discoveries have been universally discredited and are irrelevant in context.)
What Coulter does prove is that a lawyer can actually argue either side of the point. Her position that Intelligent Design is more credible than the Theory of Evolution is not unlike Johnny Cochran defending O.J. Simpson. Just like Johnny Cochran was effective in convincing a twelve people who Herrnstein and Murray (authors of `The Bell Curve') might consider to have below average intelligence that O.J. Simpson did not kill his Nicole, Coulter might convince a few folks whose Intelligence Quotient resides two standard deviations to the left of the mean to believe that the Earth is 5,000 years old.
Love you, Ann, but you missed the mark with this one.
Book Review: God is not Mocked
Summary: 5 Stars
The Year is 1792: the cobblestones of Paris are slick with blood, the nectar of the young Republic's three demigods: Liberte, Egalite, & Fraternite.
The Revolution lumbers through the streets, hoisting the bloody heads and genitalia of its enemies---the nobles, the rich, the royalist, the clerical---through the streets. It has come a long way since the King was toppled just three years ago. It has hauled its Enemies up before the Guillotine, put the traitors to the sword, baptised a new nation in the blood of the Oppressor.
Now its Jacobin footsoldiers are preparing an assault on the Fane of the Divine Himself: they sweep through the churches. They defrock its Abbes, its bishops. They seize its vast properties, its riches, its wealth. They dethrone God in his Heaven and replace him with Reason; Notre Dame is remade into a Temple of Rationalism. Time itself is bound in shackles and the Seasons suborned before the Committee for the Protection of the Revolution: the names of the months are deistically defanged, and renamed.
The French Revolutionaries assaulted the Pearly Gates; like so many men before and after, once they had emptied the Fane, cleared out the choirloft, and banished the Divine, they needed a new God to replace him. Power, of course, abhors a vacuum: the French Revolution's new God was Reason, but his rule was cut short in splendid Luciferian fashion by the Demon Princes War and Murder.
The French formerly baptized in Water; now they did so in Blood.
Ideas have Consequences, a notion which goes to the heart of Ann Coulter's new book "Godless", a wicked little jeremiad by the battle-scarred Boadicea of the American Right. Happily "Godless" is not Coulter's typical withering harangue of black vitriol (though those are entertaining), but has more on its mind.
Liberals---and Liberal Society, which has become the American Establishment---have banished God & Religion, in this case Protestantism, from mainstream Society. They have exiled Jesus Christ from the public square, lampooned his followers, marginalized the role of Christianity in American civic life, driven it out of Public Schools so the Sex, Drugs, Gang-Shootings, and Condoms have a little more room to breathe and mill around.
"Godless" does not mince words. Modern American Liberalism, having dethroned Religion in the public square, has supplanted it: it has become a Religion itself, taking on highly ecclesiastical trappings.
Liberalism nowadays is characterized by its orthodoxy: while the Right is gripped with internecine tension, in the last eight years the Left has marched in lockstep. Those heterdox and willing to speak out are vilfied and marginalized, as newly Independent U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman---in 2000 the Democrat party's Vice Presidential candidate, now driven from the party ranks---can testify.
Liberalism's clerical cohort, its punditry, clever columnists, trial lawyers, media darlings, and academics---most of all academics---bring a level of literalism to the Liberal Creed not witnessed since the days of St. Bernard, the Great Hound of Catholicism.
Coulter observes that the great Liberal Creed---its sacrosanct doctrines of Racism, Oppression of Minorities, the Evils of American Patriarchy, Multiculturalism, America as a Hateful & Corrupt Nation, Global Warming, Gun Control, Keeping Abortion Safe & Legal, Environmentalism and Animal Rights, the UN as the supreme arbiter of Foreign Policy, the whole ugly bag of it---is argued today in print, on the airwaves, in the movies---with a fervency and a hysterical orthodoxy that would shame an Inquisitor.
The point: Man needs his Gods. Liberals, as Marxists did with Marxism and the Historical Imperative in the 20th century, have made secular Liberalism their new God. Their contentions are no longer political, or driven by Reason, but quite the contrary: Liberals have adopted raw politics as their creed, with political power as the highest and noblest devotion.
It's a theory that makes sense, particularly given the nastiness with which most Liberals pillory their ideological enemies, with a level of venom and spite that goes well behind mere politics. It also serves to explain the absolute refusal of most Liberals today to cede any point in debate: how can we expect our new clergy of tie-dyed tree-hugging ecclesiastes to discard even one of the3ir Articles of Faith?
It's good stuff. It helps, of course, that it's vintage Coulter: unapologetic, scathing, and hideously funny. Being Politically Incorrect, after all, means never having to say you're sorry.
"Godless" is another round of grapeshot fired full broadside at an increasingly hidebound liberal Establishment. If you're one of the Faithful, of course, you'll hate it, & probably see the infernal thing as a breath of sulphur from the Hellmouth itself.
And if you're a Heretic?
Suffice it to say that "Godless" will be nearly a Religious experience.
JSG
Book Review: Godlessness and Science
Summary: 4 Stars
I finally got around to reading Ann Coulter's Godless:The Church of Liberalism. This is a book that I really wanted to like. I usually agree with Ms. Coulter's points of view even though I don't always agree with how she presents them. My biggest beef is she has the bad habit of grouping the entire opposition to her point of view and making broad and grand statements about them. Coulter's works are littered with phrases starting with "Liberals think..." as if she wants us to believe not only that she knows what everybody thinks, but why they think this way. In taking such a stand, she sets herself up for scrutiny.
On the other hand, her sharp wit, while irksome to many, is one reason I like reading her. Some of these topics can get a little dry but Coulter always manages to keep it interesting. It is also very apparent that she researches her material. Just about everything she points out can is referenced in her notes. Evidence of her accuracy can be found in the fact that virtually all criticism of Ms. Coulter seems to be in the form of personal attacks.
Now to the book. Chapter one explains the title of the book and why she calls liberals "Godless". She goes on to call liberalism itself, a religion, complete with its own dogma, priests, accounts of creation and human destiny. Chapters two through six explore common points of argument between the right and left - topics like crime, education, and abortion. Here, Coulter really shines. She does a great job of pointing out why the views of the left on these issues are just ridiculous. For the most part, she didn't really go into linking liberal beliefs to religion. In other words, she didn't really stick to her primary topic, but nevertheless, the arguments were spot on.
All this was just a warm up session, though. The rest of the book is where it seems to me that the real drive behind the book is. One of the common arguments of the left is that the right doesn't believe in science. Coulter is determined to turn that argument around. Today, most of this argument concerns global warming, er climate change. In Godless, Coulter doesn't get into this. Instead, she goes into the long debated argument regarding evolution versus creationism.
This was the part I really looked forward to. Coulter, one by one, defeats just about every argument of Darwin. She does this with facts about research others have done. Personally, I knew about some of the problems with Darwinism but the body of evidence Coulter presents is compelling.
I don't dispute any of her arguments. What I do dispute is her conclusion. Darwinism may not be true but that doesn't mean that science or evolution cannot account for the reason we are here. She doesn't actually say it, but I get the feeling that Coulter feels that since there are so many holes in Darwinism, that must mean that science has failed in explaining creation and therefore, we must just accept that "God did it." Coulter falls into her own trap where it's obvious that she doesn't understand science either.
Just as those who accuse creationists of being anti-science or say things like "evolution is a fact", it is equally incorrect to say that science doesn't work because of a theory being disproved. That's the whole point of science. Science isn't truth. Science isn't fact. Science is a path to discovery that is based more on failure than it is on success. Darwin's assertions may be largely disproved, but in the very least, they put us on a path. Because of this path, we know a hell of a lot more than we used to and more importantly, we understand more about what we do not know. Science will come up with better theories based upon knowledge of the failed ones.
Let's imagine a conversation in the middle ages where a budding scientist meets Anneth of Coulter. Anneth believes in the traditional "God painted the sky blue." dogma.
Scientist: Have you heard the latest scientific theory about why the sky is blue? We now believe that there is a giant sapphire in the sky. Our instrumental readings indicate that the sky color is consistent with that of a sapphire.
A of C: There are many holes in that theory. Haven't you heard that some scientists have discovered gravity and that means it would be impossible for a sapphire of the mass required to fill the sky with a blue color to exist?
Scientist: So you are saying that I need to account for gravity and come up with a better theory?
A of C: No, obviously science can't explain why the sky is blue because God did it.
Again, Godless is a worthwhile read. I just don't agree with its conclusions.
Book Review: Based on an incorrect premise-- and it goes dowhill from there.
Summary: 1 Stars
Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown, 2006)
I would like to be able to review Ann Coulter's newest tome, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, fairly. However, I find myself unable to do so because Coulter's entire premise is a ludicrous, but increasingly common, fallacy: the equation of conservatism with orthodox religion (specifically, in this case, Christianity, though I've often heard Joe Lieberman, an orthodox Jew, described as conservative as well). I'm not sure how this odd distortion of reality came about, but let me set the record straight here: anyone whose opinions on any given topic come from a solely religious viewpoint is not a conservative. They are, without doubt, a wholly different stripe of liberal than, say, the Warren Court that Coulter so despises, but trust me-- conservatives don't want them either. Where do you think the term "neocon" came from? That's right-- us. The conservatives.
To use an example that's obviously near and dear to Ann's heart, given how much she brings it up, let's talk abortion. Ann's premise is that liberals (because, obviously, all liberals feel the same on every subject; liberals are a monolith like one might find in a Kubrick film) support a government-guaranteed right to abortion on demand, while conservatives of Coulter's stripe (see above about monolithism) support a government mandate that abortion be illegal. Any true conservative knows that neither of those options is the correct answer (despite how we may feel personally; I am virulently pro-choice, myself)-- the only conservative option is "abortion falls under the ninth and tenth amendments." In other words, let the states decide. It's all right there in black and white, for anyone who cares to read the constitution.
Not that "constitutional law expert" Ann Coulter isn't above bending the laws a little. While she talks up the first amendment on a number of occasions here, it's pretty obvious that she'd like to see the first amendment (and a couple of others, notably the fifth, which she attacks over and over again while spewing invective against Miranda) go the way of the great auk. A pretty funny position for a "conservative", someone for whom the Constitution holds the same mystic power as the Bible does for the "liberals in wolves' clothing", as I've taken to calling the neocons in the past few years.
While I'd actually planned to make Coulter's unsurprising lack of actual conservative views the real substantive body of my non-review, as I was actually reading the book, I found my qualms about the sand upon which her arguments were founded taking a back seat to the woman's writing style (which, and this is surprising, Joe Maguire goes out of his way to praise numerous times in Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter). Simply put, Coulter is one of the shrieking harridans she's constantly attacking. Her writing style is based on unfunny, borderline-offensive "jokes" and ad hominem attacks rather than anything at all of substance. This isn't political writing, it's ranting, much of it unsubstantiated. That's all well and good when it's billed as ranting. I rant quite often myself, though I do at least attempt to back it up with facts sometimes, and I always clearly label ranting as ranting, and don't expect people to take it seriously. After all, it is ranting. Coulter, on the other hand, does seem to expect to be taken seriously. But whatever her views on the subject, it's obvious given her sales figures-- Godless debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list (a liberal rag she hates, by the by)-- that people do take her seriously. Which says a great deal more about the average Ann Coulter reader's lack of ability to think critically than it does about Ann Coulter, I guess. But then, Coulter subscribes to a belief system that considers it a sin to think critically, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised at that, either.
I wondered, when I was putting myself through the torture of attempting to read Ben Shapiro's worthless Porn Generation, where he'd gotten his writing style. Well, now I know, and I can safely avoid ever having to read tripe like this again. Unless, that is, another drooling sycophant like Shapiro decides to ape Ann Coulter's barely-competent writing. (zero)