Written Sunday, December 21, 2008.

Richard Dawkins and polyamory

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

.... Now to the book I have been reading. It is the Richard Dawkins' God Delusion - still. I am reading it the second time. Richard Dawkins has the priviledge of being the only author whose work I am reading the second time immediately after finishing the first reading. I do not want to misrepresent anything I say about the book.

I found it really interesting that on the first reading the word "extra-solar" did not register at all in my mind. On the second reading it really got me. I did not understand what it meant. I thought that if I google it the answer would be "not known" or "did you mean" or even saying it was nonsense. So I did. And what do you know, it is a real thing with meaning and all. Only it is written all together without a hyphen. And instead of 170 extrasolar planets in the book "As of December 2008, 333 exoplanets are listed in the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia." Its meaning (just in case there is an ignoramus like me among my readers) is stated as "a planet beyond the Solar System, orbiting around another star".

On the first reading I felt a little annoyed with what I thought as continual putting down those not trained as scientists. On the second reading, I think I may have been wrong. At least it is not so prevalent as I first thought. I probably have to read the book the third time to be certain. You all know by now that I am not a scientist or even that highly educated because I have to read the book so many times to get things clear in my mind.

I said in my first blog about this book that I thought that "Richard Dawkins in some respects looks at some things through the lenses of pers religious upbringing". On my second reading I still think that. Although I must say that what I am about to write is just my untrained thoughts. I could be totally wrong.

Richard Dawkins definately gives a wrong definition of a word per uses in pers book about human love relationships. Per says that polyamory "is the belief that one can simultaneously love several members of the opposite sex" when the wiki, the only source for the definition I have found, does not state anything about the genders of people involved. I feel Richard Dawkins is here influenced by pers religious upbringing. In the same way Richard Dawkins writes about falling in love with a person of "opposite sex". I can understand this being a evolutionary trait to make it possible for people to "go forth and multiply". I assume that the falling in love with a person of the same sex is viewed by Richard Dawkins as some kind of misfiring of this evolutionary trait.

Initially, we humans did not know how children were produced. Children I assume were a part of the group. What if falling in love was nothing to do with the sex and procreation at the beginning but a part of a friendship relationship with the added pleasuring by physical contact? Children being brought up within and by a group of friends could be just as good as a monogamous marriage. In fact, I can see some advantages (to parents and children alike) to this way of bringing up children. What if the males in trying to wrest the control from females instituted the religious marriage and all the other trappings of control that are a part of any main modern religion?