The God Delusion in Persian

Hello everyone

I’m a young Iranian atheist from Tehran, Iran. Today I’m going to write about one of my favorite books, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I’ve read TGD twice; once in English and once in Persian. Yes! It’s been translated into Persian by an Iranian rationalist with the pen name of “A. Farzam”, and luckily the full translation is available on his website “Secularism For Iran” since November 2007 (It’s in Farsi and only for Iranians. I hope it’s not considered illegal) Of course it’s not available in our local bookstores!

I enjoyed every word of the book! I think it’s brilliant; an inspiring work which is put together in a clear, comprehensible style. I can say, I had thinking about many of these things for years, but I never had enough courage to look at the whole picture. Before reading that, I always thought there was something wrong with me; because I had this odd skepticism towards belief in God compared to the others. I really tried to make sense of religion and God, but they just didn’t make any sense. It seemed as if Islam was God’s way of telling me that he does not exist.

Anyway, when I improved my English (I’m still learning) I became able to access some valuable information which didn’t seem to even exist on the planet before. I’ll never forget the day that incidentally I found an interview with Richard Dawkins in a podcast, which totally changed my mind and intrigued my curiosity like never before.

As I mentioned earlier, I was never a proper theist, but what truly made me an atheist was Evolution. I’m thankful to Prof. Dawkins who has raised our conscience, by his admirable talent of explaining, what a powerful cumulatively ratcheting ‘crane’ evolution by natural selection is, and how it has changed the way we think about life and indeed our place in the universe.

I’ve read “The Selfish Gene”, “The blind watchmaker”, “The River out of Eden” and “The God Delusion”. They were all quite interesting and informative. And all of them had massive influence on my thoughts, especially “The blind watchmaker”. I’m planning to read all his books.

It’s beyond my conception how anybody can be incurious about what science and scientific method has achieved in answering some of the deepest and must fundamental questions which were around from dawn of humanity. For tens of thousands of years our ancestors used to look at the starry night and make some conjectures about the nature of the universe and the origins of themselves. As it happens they were mostly wrong, because their assessments were not based on the evidence, but they were rather based on tradition, authority and revelation.