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Dr. William Harwood's Catalogue of Publications
ISBN: 978-1-935444-83-1
William Harwood: Catalogue of Publications and Excerpts
Reviewed by Bernard Katz (American Rationalist, date TBA)
(2009, World Audience Publishers, 399 pp, ppb, $29.00, ISBN 978-1-935444-83-1)
PRAISE FOR WILLIAM HARWOOD'S BOOKS
THE FULLY TRANSLATED BIBLE
"As if translating a bible bigger than any now in use were not a great enough achievement in its own right, Harwood has rendered serious students and critics of Christian scripture a magnificent further service: he has scrupulously avoided the deliberate mistranslations that have prevented readers from perceiving the true nature of the documents underlying the English prose."
--Frank Zindler, American Atheist
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF GOD
"It covers a surprising amount of ground, and does so remarkably fleetly. It will offend and annoy all religionists and, I suspect, a good number of humanists too. It is clever, tricky, learned, frequently foul-mouthed (mainly down to Yahweh), and very full of ideas, many of which are, to say the least, highly controversial."
--Norman Pridmore, Freethinker
UNCLE YESHU, MESSIAH
"Uncle Yeshu is not an admirable, or even a likable person. The story itself, however, is only a fraction of the wealth of information concerning the conditions, beliefs, and people of that long ago seething cauldron of ignorance, superstition, racism, hate, and fears."
--Jack Truett, Pagan Palaver
Freethought Perspective
WILLIAM HARWOOD, CATALOGUE OF PUBLICATIONS AND EXCERPTS, Paperback: 402 pages, Publisher: World Audience, Inc. 2009. ISBN 1935444832, $29.00 Available from the Publisher or Amazon.com, Reviewed by LELAND W. RUBLE
If you're reading this review, you may already be familiar with the author William Harwood, and have some familiarity with the author's vibrant writing on religion, politics, history, society, and numerous other related subjects the author has published over the years. If you've never been exposed to the author's writing, and this is your first experience, you're about to be introduced to possibly one of the most knowledgeable, exacting, provocative, and exciting nontheist writers in this era.
In this recent book, the author introduces the reader to a vast assortment of excerpts from among the over 40 books he has published, including essays on religion and related subjects, book reviews, and Letters to the Media.
In an excerpt from The Autobiography of God there is this thought provoking paragraph: "I am also changeable geographically. In Rome I so love killing babies slowly by starvation and disease, that I refuse to permit abortion or contraception. In Salt Lake City I permit population control, but reserve a special place in Hell for the monstrous sinners who drink tea or coffee. In Israel I permit the eating of salami sandwiches and cheese sandwiches, but inflict the fate of the infidels on any kike who eats a salami-and-cheese sandwich. You think laws like that--heads it's a sin and tails it's a virtue--make Me a fruitcake? Don't blame Me. They make the rules. They created Me in their own racist, sexist, might-makes right-image. I didn't create them." (p. 31)
In an excerpt from the book American Hitler: George W. ShicklBush and the Republicanazi Gestapo there is this poignant paragraph: "If God was omnipotent and omnibenevolent, and actually existed, humans would not need to urinate, defecate or menstruate; AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis and the common cold would not exist; Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell would never have been born; Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter would be confined to insane asylums for the term of their natural lives; Tom Cruise would not be a shill for the confidence swindle that's fleecing him, because L. Ron Hubbard would have spent his life wearing paper hats and asking, 'Do you want fries with that?' no one would be ever be hungry; and there would be only one religion and no nontheists, because a non-imaginary god would have unambiguously demonstrated his existence by appearing on the Tonight Show and the Late Show, turning the studio audiences (temporarily) into chimpanzees, and raising Katie Couric's ratings from the dead." (p. 56)
In the excerpt "Muhammad and the Koran" (reprinted from God, Jesus and the Bible), there is this revealing commentary which in my opinion reveals to a great extent why the Islamic faith is often depicted as a religion that appeals to fundamentalist, fanatic zealots as a platform from which they can, with deluded belief in immunity from Allah, commit murder and violence with the unrestrained sadistic indulgence of someone whose mind has morphed into that of a decaying vegetable. The author writes: "That Muhammad was essentially a terrorist and serial killer is revealed by his own words, quoted by Swarup,1 'I have been helped by terror.' Specifically, 'the beheading of eight hundred members of the tribe of Quraiza in cold blood in the market of Medina must have sent a chill of terror down the spine of everyone, foe or friend.' The Quraiza's crime? Apart from being Jews who fell into the hands of a Jew-hating prototype Hitler, they failed to join Muhammad's jihad to enslave Mecca." (p. 95).
In reference to how the concept of gods, sin etc., were first introduced into human society, here is this insightful paragraph from "Priestly Power and the Role of Sin" (reprinted from A Humanist in the Bible Belt), "There is no way of gauging the elapsed time from the creation of the first gods to the creation of the first religion; for mere belief in gods did not constitute a religion. Not until the first sun-worshipper turned his face toward the sky and asked it to ripen his crop in exchange for a gift, or until the first ambitious junior executive asked a river-god to drown her rival, also in exchange for a designated gift, did nature deification evolve into religion." (p.124)
Here's a brilliant characterization of Jesus which explains the most likely possibility of how he became the divinity worshiped by Christians, in "Jesus' Deification: When and Why?" reprinted from the book A Humanist in the Bible Belt, "From the beginning of his career as an itinerant preacher, Jesus had been viewed by his followers as the successor and equal of King David: the Messiah or rightful king of the Jews. To the Jewish masses who had hoped that his claim was valid and the freedom from Roman overlordship was days away, Jesus' death was the ultimate proof that he was just one more crank in a long line of messianic pretenders. But to the hardcore followers who swallowed the resurrection delusion, his royal status was now proven beyond doubt." (p. 158)
From "The Impossibility of Gods" reprinted from the essay For This we Thank Our Fuhrer, and which every god believer should take the opportunity to read, the author writes: "There are things humans do not know and cannot know. Are there life forms on the fifth planet of Betelgeuse whose understanding of the laws of physics is so far beyond our own that they would appear to us not to be bound by those laws, and therefore to conform to every reasonable human definition of a god? We can rate such a possibility as vanishingly small, but we cannot really know the answer." (p. 192)
"No god has ever revealed its existence, and all claims to the contrary have been traced to the same bible that a committee of investigators, including historians, linguists, scientists, and theologians, appointed by the British government, found to contain 19,000 provably false statements, including 1,000 pairs of statements so mutually exclusive that they could not both be true. For example, the aforementioned bible contradicts itself on whether the gods of such opposition religions as the Persian and Egyptian do or do not exist, whether the paramount god is an individual or a committee, and whether there is or is not life after death. It also in more then fifty passages authenticates a flat earth, a solid hemispherical sky, and stars small enough to become unglued from the sky and fall to earth as meteors. Since gods are intrinsically implausible, being violations of all known natural laws, we can conclude, from the fraudulence of all supporting testimony and the absence of a single counterexample, that they cannot and therefore do not exist." (p. 192)
There are numerous letters to the media that expose the author as most likely one of the foremost freethought writers in this current era. His unlimited knowledge of almost any subject he chooses to discuss, criticize, or expose, is a pleasure to read. He makes one think or even re-think issues that are of utmost concern to those mentally free of the tomfoolery of religious babbleism. For those still infatuated with deluded belief in a sadistic sky dictator, and still clinging to outworn fabulous beliefs that are no longer relevant to human civilization, reading this, or any one of the author's books, essays, and letters, is like awakening from a horrible nightmare and viewing reality from an entirely different perspective not dominated by an infectious belief structured on the foundation of a just as false reality of gods or the religions that have thrived from such deceptive convictions.
Don't take my word for it. Buy this book and see for yourself the most valuable contribution this author has made toward the advancement of freethought, nontheism, and the expose of religions fashioned from the exhausted remnants of implausible god beliefs.
1 Swarup, p. 39.
2 When the government that appointed the committee learned what its findings would be, it disbanded the committee and refused to allow its report to be published.
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