Now I am done with the God-debate: It's Pointless.

I have just finished reading Gary Cox's The God Confusion: Why Nobody Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question, and I think I am now done with reading books about God - for or against. Gary Cox is an agnostic, an atheistic agnostic who prefers to be called an agnostic, so his book is more against than for it. In fact, The God Confusion is a well-written and philosophical counterargument about the dusty entity called God. You could describe the book as popular philosophy, and this is not to undercut the integrity of the contents or the bona fides of the author, a reputable philosopher, but to stress his uncomplicated, slightly primerlike writing style.
Cox grounds his agnosticism in philosophy or being a philosopher because, according to him, doubt should be the default position of every thinking person. He thinks atheism is as absurd, if not impossible, a position to take as theism - you cannot strike the attitude of negating the existence of a god whose nonexistence defines your position; therefore, he gives short shrift to 'new atheism' and its popularisers like Richard Dawkins. But like the secular philosopher he is, he is not particularly interested in setting Richard Dawkins or his imaginary enemy, God, down from the pedestals on which some people have installed them. He only tries to offer empirical and invariably contrary datums to the question of God.
The God Confusion is worthy of review, but I will let that pass because that is not the point. As a matter of fact, to attempt to review or critique this book is to squelch the very purpose of putting this down. However, while solidly ensconced in his sceptical stance, Cox upends the many fanciful building blocks of the entity called 'God.' The idea of God. The concept of God. Ontological argument. Cosmological argument. The Unmoved Mover argument. Theodicean argument. Teleological Argument. Evolution. And many more. And the many dramatis personae in the God superdebate. Bishop Berkeley. Anselm. Pascal. Voltaire. Descartes. Darwin. Aquinas. Augustine. Nietzsche. Kant. Hume. Durkheim. William James. Freud. Even bit players like Aristotle, Gaunilo, Wittgenstein, Plato, JL Mackie. Cox's conclusions are balanced and unhysterical but surefootedly agnostic and sceptical.
However, in spite of the book's satisfactoriness, halfway through, I had a sort of reverse epiphany: now I am getting bored by all this, I thought. This eternal God Argument. By the time I finished the illuminating book, my mind was made up. I will not waste time and dissipate mental heat on books about God again - I am done with them. This is probably an unintellectual attitude, but seeing the number of books I have read, pro and con, about something patently a chimaera, I thought it was about time to pack it in. Note that The God Confusion is a play on Dawkins's The God Delusion, which itself is an allusion to Freud's religion-is-illusion observation. Being the urtext of 'New Atheist' thinking, Dawkins's The God Delusion has spawned mostly alliterative textual responses, what I'd call 'Delusion industry,' anything from the two theocentric 'Dawkins Delusion' to the utterly misbegotten 'Deluded By Dawkins.'
The God Confusion is in a different league, as it neither seeks to counter Dawkins nor recompound his heady atheistic absinthe, it's only a book which points out the irrationality of thinking, or believing, in any being called God. I am an agnostic of sorts, so that argument agrees with my thinking. But even a fine, well-written book like this would not help relieve the intellectual bloatedness I now suffer about the question of God, having ingested and engorged spoonloads of treacle, bile, pap, and even heaps of crap, owing to a hunger for understanding, clarification, for better insight into the nonthing described as 'God.' From the Bible to the Qur'an, to GB Shaw's Black Girl in Search of Her God, to Kierkegaard and many books by atheists, agnostics, philosophers, and theologians. A few weeks ago, I picked up Karen Armstrong's The Case For God (why she used 'The' and not 'A' I don't know). Armstrong's lawyering in God's behalf is very much in character: slipperiness, jargoneering, a shuffling of apriorism and aposteriorism, clever apologetics, heavy deployment of 'dead languages,' I mean Latin and Greek. God the Being itself is ipsum Esse subsitens, God as the Prime Mover...the Necessary Being is quod omnes dicunt Deum. I guess it would be seen as facetious if I translated the latter into 'God is a Fat Bearded Cunt,' but then that was as much sense as Armstrong's book made to me. Not too long ago, I read Terry Eagleton's 'Culture and the Death of God.' Now, this is one of the more cryptic and difficult parts of Eagleton's high-tone tomes. In the book he stylisedly skirts the death of God and he uses an elaborate trudge through the lush historical meadows of the French\English Enlightenment, German idealism, and Romanticism to confront, in a backhanded way, the death of God.
By the way, every book written by every atheist, agnostic, apatheist - antitheists in sum - in the last 150 years or so has been a kind of variation on, and a rehash of, searching intellectual firstfruits of freethought by early 'disbelievers' like Baron D'Holbach and Jean Meslier, or a comparatively latter one like Ludwig Feuerbach. Although I will continue to read books about the inanities of religion, which, of course, will always carry with it the negation of God and its existence, I don't think I will again spend time reading any book that seeks to prove or disprove the existence of God. Now, so saturated with the anodyne reagent of God-debate, I might very well go John Updike's Dale Kohler one better and try to extrude a cast-iron God from the entrails of my computer.
In spite of having always preferred the label agnostic to atheist, I have never truly been an either\or person - 'either-there-is-God-or-there-is-no-God' person. By the time I reached high-noon as a nonbeliever in God or gods a few years ago, the golden mean had become neither\nor, and it still is: I no longer err on the side of doubt nor certainty. For me, the question of whether there is or there is no God is superfluous, time-wasting waffle. This attitude somehow bears on what some have described as ignosticism or igtheism, meaning, broadly, that the lack of a clear definition of the term 'God' tends to make any debate about it unnecessary. Oh, I am not about to suggest that I should be described as an ignosticist or igtheist or a contratheist or antignostic etc. An alternation between agnostic and apatheist is just about enough. Is it? So, how would you describe yourself if you spurned all debate about God because you thought it was nonsense? An I-dont-give-a-fuckist.