Instead, I would read Taylor, Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, and maybe Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality.
1. His non-biological work, that is.
It's okay to read more digestible books, and not serious academic studies. In fact it's more than okay -- in order to understand an academic study you likely need to do a lot of reading on the topic before hand. A pop sci/culture book is very self contained. I can assure you that very few people in the world can read The Genealogy of Morals and understand much of it without having read a significant amount of philosophy before.
Personally, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra before reading The God Delusion. I can't remember much of the Nietzsche book, but The God Delusion's arguments are forever etched into my brain. It doesn't matter if I didn't get the Russell's teapot argument from a primary source, it matters that I got it.
It’s the equivalent of watching a 5-hour YouTube video about programming and thinking you understand computer science, except that books by Dawkins et al are not even very good, impartial introductions to the topic. All I can say is: if the topic of religion is interesting to you, these are not good books to start with.
I also really don’t think Genealogy of Morality is all that complicated.
Edit: I just remembered this excellent book by Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion. I really recommend that if you’re looking for a more nuanced but modern take of what Nietzsche thought about religion.
I'm not familiar enough with the Qur'an to comment on it.
This is a feature for its followers, because they can and do pick and choose the parts they like and ignore the rest.
Its really the songs / performances that carry the Christian belief; few people actually read the bible but they can all re-iterate to you that Christ was born in a manager because there was no room in the inn (not in the Bible).
It attacks claims made by some simple lay people, based on their half-baked understanding of their own faiths (which they never really dug into). However, people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims.
The arguments being debunked are ones that religious scholars themselves would have disagreed with. Such misrepresentations don't guide anyone
What is a good example?
https://www.amazon.com/God-New-Atheism-Critical-Response/dp/...
Here's a short clip of Dr. Sami Ameri, a published author and expert, discussing but one of Dawkin's fallacies in his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsNpvZN76zU
One problem is that he doesn't understand what he is arguing against. Dawkins doesn't argue that, because people tend to have similar beliefs as those around them, he has disproved those beliefs. He just uses it to illustrate the close minded way some people take the supremacy of their particular religion for granted. The question "What if you are wrong?" comes with a lot of assumptions.
It's also laughable for an expert (for a number of reasons) to claim that C.S. Lewis has disproved atheism.
Details do matter, because they lump all religions together and attempt to argue against them as a whole, not realizing that there exist core differences among them, even if there is potentially large overlap between say Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Disregarding these facts is doing an injustice to themselves and to their audience, and spreads ignorance and malice.
To put it another way, if you read the book and you are religious then it probably matters to you in a way that other's just don't give a damn about. For example, I remember at uni some Christians in my class debating the holy spirit / God / Jesus and the distinction or lack thereof. But if you're not Christian then it doesn't matter, that detail has no bearing on you at all. In the same way that if you are Christian then a book discussing whether Jesus was a mythical figure and retelling of an older story or a real person, that detail is just outside your belief system, it doesn't have any bearing on you and there's no point engaging with that detail.
And that argument is fundamentally flawed, and is the point I'm trying to make. While it may apply to other religions, it does not apply to Islam. This is where Dawkins and his ilk show their ignorance and fall flat, and falsifies their entire approach. What appears to them as (or them falsely assuming to be) underpinnings, isn't, if I can put it in another way.
I don't see the parallel to the example you gave. Once you're inside a religion, then you can discuss its details and nuances like the examples you gave. That's a completely orthogonal discussion however. Dawkins and the neo-atheist movement are arguing core basics like the existence of God, then using some fallacies that some religions commit to discredit every religion. See the problem there?
For Dawkings, truth is something that can be empirically proven. Truth for Dr. Ameri seems to be a logically sound argument.
Meaningful discourse can't happen if there is no agreement over the words being used.
https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bl...
I haven't read this one, but seems on point: https://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolutio...
To be clear, Hart's own religious views seem pretty eclectic, and he is much less dogmatically Christian than blurbs and marketing of his books suggest.
If someone were to attack the arguments for atheism in good faith I would hope they would fight its strongest arguments and not just tackle a hack like Dawkins. I'd like to extend the arguments for God the same courtesy.
Attacking a strawman is perfectly appropriate in this case, because the strawman is what actually drives policy.
I've wondered whether it is possible to be both, say, a Christian and an atheist simultaneously (e.g., not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good, or perhaps interpreting the Bible completely metaphorically).
I imagine that scholars can have serious disagreements over the meaning of the Bible or even its provenance without necessarily leaving the religion.
Yes, this happens.
The vast majority of historians, including atheist ones, think that someone answering to that general description _did_ exist, though they obviously don't think he was the son of God.
> not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good
Substitute 'God' for 'Christ', and yeah, that's common. Many people are also purely _culturally_ religious; they don't believe in a god (or at least not the one their religion mandates), and do not accept many of the teachings or beliefs of their religion, but do _identify_ as being a member of a religion. In Ireland, say, 70% of people identified as Catholic on the most recent census (in the 90s this was closer to 90%; younger people _are_ less likely to engage in this practice and the child abuse scandals also caused many older people to break away), but in polling the majority of Irish Catholics do not believe in, well, Catholic stuff (a personal god, hell, transubstantiation, the virgin birth, etc), or accept the Church's moral worldview (see outcomes of referendums on abortion, equal marriage etc).
No true religious people in scotland?