As we men­tioned last week, Karen Arm­strong’s new book, The Case for God, is out. And now you can read the first chap­ter for free. Just click on this link, and then the book view­er on the left side of the page. It will expand, and from there you can start flip­ping through the pages. Be warned, the viewer/reader is a lit­tle clunky. The down­side of free, I guess.

In recent years, we have seen a num­ber of books pub­lished that have made the case for athe­ism: Richard Dawk­in’s The God Delu­sion, Christo­pher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, Sam Har­ris’ Let­ter to a Chris­t­ian Nation, and Daniel Den­net­t’s Break­ing the Spell: Reli­gion as a Nat­ur­al Phe­nom­e­non. It was almost as if a dam had bro­ken, and sud­den­ly a voice that had­n’t been heard in some time, at least not in the US, was let loose. The books hit hard, one after anoth­er, and they made their point. And now Karen Arm­strong, who has writ­ten more than 20 books on Islam, Judaism and Chris­tian­i­ty, offers a reply. Her new book pub­lished this week, The Case for God: What Reli­gion Real­ly Means, takes a his­tor­i­cal look at God and con­cludes that we mod­erns (athe­ists, evan­gel­i­cals and the rest) are work­ing with a facile con­cep­tion of God. And then she sug­gests an alter­na­tive way of see­ing things. You can get a taste for her think­ing in this NPR inter­view con­duct­ed this week: Lis­ten with the play­er below, or via these links (MP3 — iTunes — Stream):

A good find by Kottke.org…

Jared Dia­mond, the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning author of Guns, Germs & Steel (and Col­lapse: How Soci­eties Choose to Fail or Suc­ceed), offers a lec­ture at USC where he gets into the uni­ver­sal attrib­ut­es of reli­gions and their under­ly­ing adap­tive value/social pur­pose. The talk runs about 41 min­utes, fol­lowed by a long Q&A ses­sion.

For those look­ing for more aca­d­e­m­ic lec­tures, I should remind you of the recent launch of YouTube EDU and Aca­d­e­m­ic Earth, plus our large col­lec­tion of free uni­ver­si­ty cours­es.

via @kottkedotorg

I did­n’t think it would be pos­si­ble, but it hap­pened. I found my two least favorite intel­lec­tu­als togeth­er on the same stage, and King’s Col­lege in NYC made it all pos­si­ble. So, to mark the occa­sion, I bring you Dinesh D’Souza, the acad­e­my’s dressed up ver­sion of Ann Coul­ter, debat­ing the ever surly Christo­pher Hitchens. The top­ic is faith and athe­ism. The debate is heat­ed. And as you watch, you’ll see the charm­ing per­son­al­i­ties come out. The video con­tin­ues with Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, and Part 10. 90 min­utes in total.