Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion has spent a number of weeks in the Times Best Seller list, As well as being serialised in the same newspaper. It is a book in which Dawkins aims to attack faith, 'If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.' Though he also ensures he covers all bases, if it doesn't do that its because: 'dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods [such as issuing] a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely a work of Satan.'

Readers who have not undergone such 'indoctrination' or are intelligent enough will learn from the book to break free from the shackles of religion. The book is a follow up to the Television Series 'The Root of all evil'. It is an attack on Authoritarian religion, religion which encourages indoctrination and discourages exploration and thinking through faith for ones self. It is therefore an attack upon a straw man. That is not the faith of those who follow Jesus Christ as it is found in the New Testament.

Dawkins book isn't just an attack on Christianity, he writes "I am calling only supernatural gods delusional" he does however admit that since Christianity is what he knows best that is what his book is directed against. However, it appears that he hasn't really understood what he is attacking; he describes the God of the Old Testament as "...arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction..." It appears he has not read of God saving his people from slavery, or of his grace to Adam and Eve or his loving provision of a land to his people, or any number of other lavish accounts of God's grace to those undeserving of it.

Dawkins understanding of the New Testament is little better, he describes Christianity as "founded by Paul of Tarsus as a ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism...spread by the sword..." Yet Dawkins misses the big point Christianity is a religion founded by Jesus Christ, based on what he has done, it was spreading before Paul's conversion, and Paul was God's chosen means of conveying the great news of God's grace to the Gentiles. And any historian of the first couple of centuries will agree that Christians were heavily persecuted, not the persecuters, and that is the environment in which Christianity spread rapidly.

Dawkins defines a delusion as " a persistant false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence..." He classes belief in a God to be just such a belief. Yet the tragedy is that Dawkins himself is deluded about the nature of Christianity and belief in God in that he holds to a peristant false belief in what Christians believe in the face of strong contradictory evidence - namely the New Testament and the lives of Christians.

H Allen Orr, himself unsympathetic to the Bible and Christianity, writing in the New York Review of Books has this to say about Dawkins book:"The God Delusion never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins's book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they're terminally ill?)."