Comments on: Review: Godless by Dan Barker

By: Don Blair

Don Blair — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:51:09 +0000

Hello, As a subscriber to the excellentFreedom From Religion newspaper I naturally had to obtain a copy of Dan Barker’s Godless. Also excellent and now…glad to read that it is much the same, but more complete, than his preceding book. I found the Dear Theologian letter (chapter 19)to be a hoot and a highlight. As a member of the Florida Humanist group, Sarasota/Venice chapter, I am recommending Dan’s book to our members every chance I get.

By: the chaplain

the chaplain — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:15:38 +0000

I think I was one of the commenters at A Thinking Man’s blog who said that Barker seemed to be too self-involved at points. Granted, it’s an autobiography, so of course he’s going to talk about himself. What got to me, as I recall, were some of the details, along the lines of, “I did a concert in LA that night, then took the red-eye to get to an early morning recording session in NYC the next day,” sort of stuff. I felt like he was working a bit too hard to impress us with his status in the evangelical world. That’s what I was thinking of when I said he was self-involved.

Disclosure: the LA to NYC stuff is totally fabricated and I don’t think Barker said anything quite that over-the-top in his book. It just gives an example of the feeling I got when I read some parts of the autobiography. Notwithstanding that, much of the book aside from the autobiography is pretty good stuff. It’s worth reading if one hasn’t read the earlier book.

By: Eshu

Eshu — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:03:06 +0000

Lorena,
Thanks for the link, Athinkingman’s review is well worth reading as he has a different angle and some more detail than mine.
Dan Barker was perhaps self-involved when it came to music, etc. (The thought of atheist music doesn’t seem any more exciting to me than the religious kind.) However overall I wouldn’t say it was excessive in that respect for an autobiography. It didn’t annoy me, anyway.

By: yunshui

yunshui — Tue, 05 May 2009 10:40:33 +0000

I was thrown into a panic when I started reading Godless, since it bore such a strong resemblance to Losing Faith In Faith that I thought I'd been hoodwinked into buying the same book twice! Thankfully, there's just about enough new material in the later chapters to make up for the similarities early on, but there's still a lot of crossover material. The deconversion story is almost word-for-word from Losing Faith... in places, and the anti-apologetics in the following chapters are nothing John Loftus hasn't covered in substantially more detail. Really, the most worthwhile bit of the book is the third section, detailing the activities of the FFRF, but this is of less interest to a British audience, and contains a lot of rather tedious legal stuff. I thought Godless had moments of great beauty (the bit where he decribes standing on the two opposite edges of the Atlantic, for example), but overall, it's an unecessary add-on to his earlier book. And yeah, he is pretty self-involved - but it's an autobiography, what would you expect?

By: Lorena

Lorena — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:26:35 +0000

Eshu, Athinking man wrote a review for this book a while ago. Some commenters said that Dan Barker appeared self-involved. Did you get that impression at all?

By: Temaskian

Temaskian — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:34:53 +0000

“…edifying read” Haha! That’s a familiar phrase.

Good point about the briefness of his de-conversion story. It’s very difficult for someone who’s very particular about truth to risk recounting something wrongly.