I finally watched Richard Dawkins' The Root of All Evil? two nights ago.

I suppose my short review is, I was disappointed.

My first complaint was that, for a man known as Darwin's Rottweiler, he was far too nice. He interviewed several religious men, all of whom said one thing or another which was patently ridiculous, and he rarely forced the issue with anything like the stubborn ardor that one would expect from Dawkins. It often seemed to me that his opponents only looked silly because I took it for granted that "Because the Bible says so" is an invalid argument. If I had not sat down to watch the show with this mindset, I would have thought that, as often as not, Dawkins got the short end of his conversations with zealots.

This leads to me to my second complaint, which is that the presentation lacked a focused, structured message or organizing argument. PZ Myers said

I've also heard the show dismissed as "preaching to the converted"…which I think is roughly 180° misdirected. If I have any complaints, it is that I am not the audience for the show—what he said was nothing I haven't thought myself for years. The target audience is actually that great mass of people out there who have never heard a peep of that great body of secular criticism of religion. Seriously, most Americans can go through their lives hearing nothing but repetitive paeans of praise for the virtues of religious life; The Root of All Evil? is one of those too-rare attempts to reach out to the uninformed and explain the freethinker's argument against religion.

Well, sort of. It's true that Dawkins isn't preaching to the converted, but only because he isn't preaching to anyone at all. He does make a few good attempts to show some of the ridiculous aspects of religion. Some of these are effective. About the crucifiction of Christ, Dawkins asks, "If God wanted us to be forgiven, why not just forgive us? Who was He trying to impress?" There is also an account of the chilling story in Judges 19 (retold at that link with Legos). Other attempts, such as the interactions with zealots that I've already mentioned, are not effective, because Dawkins is content to hold civil conversations with near-lunatics. So, while it is an attempt to reach out to the religious in the world, it's a surprisingly poorly executed attempt.

I think a much more effective program could have been constructed where he spent less time speaking to me, and saying, "Gee aren't these religious crazies crazy," and more time speaking to the sane religious people and saying, "Look, here's what a rational, materialist approach to the world, founded in a scientific understanding thereof, is really all about."

Before you say, "Well, maybe he just wants them to see their own leaders as crazy," I just don't think he convinced anyone of that. They deal with these leaders in their everyday lives, and they obviously respect them. Such a result would have required a much more careful, thorough dismantling of their arguments than was actually presented.

There are two people in my life who believe seriously in God, and who I think are both 1) worth the work of and 2) capable of being saved. I was hoping that, once I was done watching the show, I would have found something in it to make it worth burning to DVD and sending to at least one of these people. I didn't find that. There simply weren't enough moments which I thought would make a religious person say, "Huh. I never thought of that..." to overcome the natural aversion that people have to attempts by their friends to change their minds.

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