This book was an enjoyable read, but in the end Onfray did not prove his thesis. After the preface, which fished me in, the first third of the book was a bit of a slog. I have to admit after he used the word ontological three times in the first few pages, I had to get my dictionary to look it up.The preface describes a trip to the middle east where he visited with desert nomads – ignorant people whose way of life, and thinking, had not changed in thousands of years. These people were the very model of the founders of monotheism. And, why would their insights into the world have any relevance to today. The short answer … it wouldn’t.
The second half of the book makes a damning case against the big three monotheisms. They are big fat targets that are incredibly easy to ridicule. But I don’t think he has made a convincing case for atheism. More on that later.
He spends a great number of pages lamenting the fact that atheism is a negative term “a” - “theism” ie. against or not theistic. The theisms all have positive names: the big three names in the subtitle, plus an endless list of nouns and proper nouns: deist, pantheist, monotheist, polytheist, animists, Catholics, Protestants, Lutherans, Calvinists, Shiite, Sunni, etc. He claims that language lacks a noun that describes our beliefs with a positive construction. He doesn’t deal with what I think are positive and suitable descriptors: realist, humanist, scientist, observationalist. But I will grant him that we do not commonly label people such as myself with a name other than “atheist".
