I was brought up as an atheist, in an atheistic family, in a thoroughly atheistic country with no single believer in sight. This made me wary of my atheism, as I was merely born into it, like others are born into Catholicism or Islam. For this reason I wanted to give religion a fair chance and used every opportunity to understand what it is about. I tried to see the light. I honestly did. I tried to see all these beautiful clothes on an emperor, who, beside nice outfit, they said is a nice guy.

This is why I was reluctant to read The God Delusion, even though I had a great interest in it. I am reluctant to read books that I know will confirm what I already believe in. My caution about The God Delusion was wise, as it turned, because once started, I couldn't put it down. Here comes Richard Dawkins and says what I was trying to un-believe in -- that an emperor has no clothes.

Some quotes that I would like to share...

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

What is so special about religion that we grant it such uniquely privileged respect? As H. L. Mencken said: 'We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.'

The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. ...

Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn - for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards. How many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for cheeking your parents? If we reject Deuteronomy and Leviticus (as all enlightened moderns do), by what criteria do we then decide which of religion's moral values to accept? Or should we pick and choose among all the world's religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?

Remember Ambrose Bierce's witty definition of the verb 'to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'.

Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. 'Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,' was Russell's (I almost said immortal) reply.

I do not, by nature, thrive on confrontation. I don't think the adversarial format is well designed to get at the truth, and I regularly refuse invitations to take part in formal debates. ... In particular, for reasons explained in A Devil's Chaplain, I never take part in debates with creationists. I do not have the chutzpah to refuse on the grounds offered by one of my most distinguished scientific colleagues, whenever a creationist tries to stage a formal debate with him (I shall not name him, but his words should be read in an Australian accent): 'That would look great on your CV; not so good on mine.'

More generally (and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam), what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them - given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by - to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades. Immunized against fear by the promise of a martyr's paradise, the authentic faith-head deserves a high place in the history of armaments, alongside the longbow, the warhorse, the tank and the cluster bomb.

And if this is not good enough, I found an answer to a problem that tormented me for long time,

When I interviewed for television the Reverend Michael Bray, a prominent American anti-abortion activist, I asked him why evangelical Christians were so obsessed with private sexual inclinations such as homosexuality, which didn't interfere with anybody else's life. His reply invoked something like self-defence. Innocent citizens are at risk of becoming collateral damage when God chooses to strike a town with a natural disaster because it houses sinners.

David Crystal's The Fight for English. How language pundits ate, shot, and left is a short history of attitudes toward English; "presriptivist" attitudes to be specific, told via a series of anecdotes, from Daniel Defoe's proposal to the king William III to establish a society 'to polish and refine the English Tongue', and to

advance the so much neglected Faculty of Correct Language, to establish Purity and Propriety of Stile, and to purge it from all the Irregular Additions that Ignorance and Affectation have introduc'd; and all those innovations in Speech, if I may call them such, which some Dogmatic Writers have the Confidence to foster upon their native language, as if their Authority were sufficient to make their own Fancy legitimate.

to lord Chesterfield's desire to "choose a 'dictator', ... to provide order in the language" and his appointing Samuel Johnson, the maker of he most influential dictionary of English of that time, as his dictator:

I give my vote for Mr Johnson to fill that great and arduous post. And I hereby declare that I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English language, as a freeborn British subject, to the said Mr Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship. Nay more; I will not only obey him, like an Old Roman, as my dictator, but, like a modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in him as my pope, and hold him to be inflatable while in the chair; but no longer.

The author shows how and why "zero tolerance" approach to the language is wrong, and he does it in an easy to read and entertaining manner. I am not sure how convincing his easy-to-read arguments are, though, because I was already convinced by more difficult to read Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language, which presents a much more persuasive case -- if you have enough patience to work through all its meticulously collected details.

In The Fight for English one will find lots of assorted interesting facts about English. I understand its dreadful spelling system better now, after learning that qu came from French, and gh from Dutch, and that

There was a genuine belief that it would help people if they could 'see' the original Latin in a Latin-derived English word. So someone added a b to the word typically spelled det, dett, or dette in Middle English, because the source in Latin was debitium, and it became debt, and caught on. Similarly, an o was added to peple, because it came from populum: we find both poeple and people, before the latter became the norm. An s was added to ile and iland, because of Latin insula, so we now have island.