For people such as myself who are not religious 
How is it people ?
Much like Richard Dawkins is an inflammatory character, so is the title of his most well known book. For people such as myself who are not religious, his passion for helping humanity move beyond superstitious dogma so as to allow in a more complex, complete, and exhilarating understanding of the world and universe in which we exist does not appear offensive. However, I can appreciate why people who are of a religious persuasion would feel inclined to steer clear of Dawkins and his writing. Yet, I would encourage those people to cast aside their initial disgust and discomfort with the author and title, because, if one has an open mind this book will provide illuminating intellectual reading, and if one does not yet have an open mind, this is just the sort of reading that may begin to break down the barriers of closed-mindedness.I believe if you are going to get anything out of this book you'll have to read it in order, as skipping around could easily leave you either not understanding things, or upset you to the point of not picking the book back up. If you do choose to read it, and you do read it in order and in full, I don't think you'll be disappointed, and I can almost assure that only the most closed-minded individuals will find themselves upset at what they've taken in.Dawkins will challenge you to think about things in a new way. He'll challenge you to wonder why religious beliefs are not held to the same standards of scrutiny and given more than customary respect. That's the first key. In order to appreciate any of his points you have to be willing to give up the "religious beliefs are not to be questioned, scrutinized, or challenged on grounds that such is disrespectful" attitude.  From there you will be challenged to consider the black and white nature with which we have drawn religious arguments. Instead of "believer," "agnostic" and "atheist" he challenges you to rightly think of all people as agnostics, in the sense none of us can know if God is real or not. He'll also try and make you understand that there is a false equivalency pertaining to religious and non-religious beliefs. Religious beliefs are spectacular claims with no supporting evidence, and although they could be true, it's not non-believers job to disprove the non evidentiary based claims of religion, but rather believers job to demonstrate why exactly they say we should believe in these things for which there is no evidence.From there, you will go on a journey of pseudo-evidence. You'll look at all sorts of unscientific claims that religious people hold up as "proof of God." Everything from "the world is beautiful" to "I feel God in my life" to "something so perfect has to be real," to "here's a really smart person who believes," to "our existence is unlikely," etc, etc. Dawkins forces you to think with scientific rationality instead of hopeful dogma. The fact things are perceived as beautiful, improbable, complex, or whatever else doesn't somehow mean that it's more likely for some all powerful deity to exist. We are so conditioned to view anything that is unusually good, bad, confusing, or unknown in both our individual lives and our world, as proof of an arbitrarily presupposed supernatural creator that we never stop to think, "hey maybe things can be really pretty, or really complicated, or whatever else without their being some magical creator."This will transition nicely to when he subsequently talks about how the unknown, which we use as "proof of God," allowed the notion of God to exist in the first place. As a scientist, Dawkins understands that his trade is aimed at finding gaps in our knowledge, and using the scientific method to discover answers to what we previously did not know. Religion is what serves as a placeholder for yet unanswered questions or not fully understood phenomenon. With this understanding in mind, Dawkins proposes that science is viewed as the enemy of religion precisely because it is indeed the thing that kills religion. When you understand how things work, when the question is answered, then the answer can no longer be, "God." He fully acknowledges how some people view science as merely "revealing" the ways of God, but he heavily implies that this is illogical, as the ways of God that religions talk about are very different indeed from the actual answers science ends up providing.Yet, aside from the "filler of holes" concept, Dawkins challenges you to consider where religion comes from. In my opinion he does a poor job of answering this question, which might be explained by the fact he is an evolutionary biologist. He works with how life has evolved, rather than how it started (that will ultimately be the job of chemists as opposed to biologists as he points out). Thus, he makes some very good insights into how religion has spread and why it persists (sort of the evolution of the perpetuation of religion), but he fails to come up with, or really even attempt to come up with, a theory as to where the human desire to create the religions it did originates from. As for how it is perpetuated he talks about the role of parents and other social institutions enforcing religious beliefs as truths in impressionable young minds, such that it becomes cyclical and immune to analytical, scientific reasoning.After considering all this (that religion should be challenged like anything, that agnosticism is false equivalency, that the "proofs" for God are not actually evidence in any kind of scientific, logical, or intellectual sense, and a consideration of where religion came from, with its basic function) the rest of the book focuses on a refutation of religious apologies. Basically, Dawkins points out the obvious (that there is no evidence for God and that it's beyond unlikely one actually exists), but he acknowledges that whether or not God is actually real or not is the improper question to ask of most people. For most people it is not "is God real?" but rather, "ought we believe in God, real or not?" He'll talk about morality and how so many people assume it takes religion to instill and enforce a sense of right and wrong in people. Yet, he understands that scientifically this is not so, due to his background in evolutionary psychology. He understands that what we know as right and wrong is a byproduct of the sort of personality traits that were chosen during the course of sexual selection to help our intelligent, social species better survive. In other words, people who are alive today had the ancestors whose personalities saw right and wrong in the way most all people today do, and they survived because their social moral codes worked out best for humans. Ironically, this concept of "natural law" (i.e. we all have this fairly uniform sense of morality) is often used by religious people as proof of God. (basically, hey if we all have this sense of right and wrong there must have been a deity that put this sense in all of us....you can see why creationists and people who understand and accept the science of evolution have such problems with each other) The implications of our morality coming from our DNA rather than from an adherence to religious texts is, to Dawkins, (and to many such as myself) the sort of proof that, yes, everyone will be just as good without religion.Expanding off of this concept, Dawkins will go on to describe how social memes (basically the zeitgeist) evolve in an inevitably progressive direction over time (overall, as there can be temporary setbacks along the overall progressive trend). It is for this precise reason, he asserts, that more and more of things like the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran are no longer adhered to today. Our morality exists because of evolution, which also means it's always evolving (it's why we have the evolution of the zeitgeist). Of course, this, despite making very good sense, is a problem for religious people, as social memes become more progressive as humanity grows and matures with evolution, despite religious writings remaining fixed in the less mature, less progressive times they were written. A conflict erupts between those people that want to continue to adhere to larger amounts of various religious writings based on a whimsical assumption they are a sort of absolute truth with a capital T, and the rest of people who will allow our moral evolution to continue to improve with time and experience as a species. As impolite as it might sound (since we are accustomed to giving religion such high levels of respect and insulation from scrutiny) belief in the perfection of scripture creates an obstacle for the evolution of humanity's moral progress.To really drive home the point that our morality comes from ourselves rather than some scriptures attributed to some deity, Dawkins talks about how things we today see as the "good parts" of something such as the Bible, like "love thy neighbor" or "thou shall not kill," are actually just as misleading as something like "we the people" in our Constitution. Things like thou shall not kill were meant to say "thou shall not kill Jews" much in the way "people" used to mean only white male property owners. Yet, today religious people interpret these Biblical rules to be more inclusive and tolerant. They do this not because the meanings of the Bible suddenly changed, but because the people reading them did. We evolve, our morality evolves, and it improves. Which is precisely why it is ridiculous that we hold up a book like the Bible that talks about ritual human sacrifices, stoning of women, killing people who work on Sunday, giving your daughter's virginity to as retribution to save a man from being anally raped, etc, etc, as some sort of "code of our morality." The fact we can pick and choose the "good" and "bad" parts is demonstrative that it's been us, humans, not some divine intervention all along.From there, Dawkins will talk about what he perceives as the damage religion creates. He basically subscribes to the idea that good people will be good and bad people bad with or without religion, but only with religion will good people do bad. I and others aren't so sure of that, although there is a strong circumstantial case to be made. However, I do regret that Dawkins goes on such a lengthy, albeit incredibly well articulated bashing of his perceived horrors of religion, as I feel it will turn too many otherwise open intellectual, scientifically minded people away from the larger message of the book, which is that freedom of thought should always trump dogma. Obviously he jumps into the homosexuality thing, as it really is one of those things no one would be against if not for religion. Yet, I find this part of the book, at least given what the book's larger objective is, to be rather unnecessary. The discussion of the religious objection to abortion is more interesting; although still not something I would have gone after if I were attempting to do what Dawkins was. The notion of consequentialism (what are the consequences of permitting or not permitting this action) vs. the notion of absolutism (this action shall be permitted or not permitted based on an absolute, predetermined labeling of the thing as "good" or "bad" based on my religion) is a riveting one, but I think it is only such if you are already intellectually enlightened prior to the picking up of Dawkins' writing. I further believe he makes a mistake in demonizing "moderate" religion, and nearly suggesting that it is as much not a real thing as "50/50 agnocisticsm" is. Moderate religious belief may not be any less scientifically implausible and ridiculous than extremist religious belief, but if we are truly asking ourselves if we ought to be militant atheists or atheists with a religiously libertarian attitude to the unenlightened world, I think a consideration of the lesser damages of moderate religion should be better considered (he seems to view people like Ted Haggard as "moderate" by American standards, perhaps a disillusioned view of the extremeness of American religiosity coming from a Brit that thinks we are worse than we really are)After taking this detour to talk about the bad of religion, Dawkins comes back to a far more convincing "ought we to" argument. The question is whether we ought to raise children religiously (which is basically a form of indoctrination, no matter how mild the upbringing may be). He points out the absurdity of labeling kids by their parents religion (you would never do that with their parent's political or economic opinions). He also points out that while physical abuse is horrible, abuse of the mind leaves far longer lasting scars. I think the way in which he makes the point is very sloppy and perhaps even unknowingly offensive, as he compares the Catholic priest scandal to indoctrinating of minds and calls the latter worse (as well as discussing the story of a woman who said she had been more traumatized as child by thinking her dead friend was burning in hell for being the wrong religion than she was by being sexually abused by a priest). Overall, I'm not sure I can come to think of any form of religious indoctrination as worse than sexual exploitation of minors, but I can appreciate that even when a household is open minded and intellectual and the parents fully accepting of whatever their children end up believing later on (as was the case with mine) being raised religious still leaves you with a nasty feeling that you've done something wrong, that you failed your parents, that they'd be happier if they you had turned out as they intended, or even that somehow you are indicating to them you don't think of them as good people since you ended up believing in different things than they did.On a tamer note, Dawkins goes on to make the distinction between teaching about religion and teaching religion. Much as we learn of Greek and Roman mythology so that we may understand the literary gems of the day, Dawkins asserts that we do need to explore contemporary western religious for literary purposes. Yet, he couples this with a harsh discussion of how trying to teach religious dogma in place of or in refutation of sound science is perhaps the worst form of intellectual child abuse.The book concludes with an examination of the most powerful "ought we" question. Even if it's beyond unlikely there is a God for which there is no sound evidence, ought we to believe in it, or at least socially protect the belief in such, not because it will save our morality, or because it fails to harm, or because parents should be left to teach their kids as they choose (religion does not make our morality, it's not without harm, and parental indoctrination is, in fact, one such harm), but rather because it provides an ability to comfort, console, and inspire humanity? In trying to answer this question Dawkins first concedes that the notion of God does comfort, console, and inspire people. By doing this, he appears to unknowingly answer the question he earlier failed to answer (from where does religion come?). Religion, it would seem comes from adults who couldn't give up the security of an unconditional, loving, helpful friend that always has time to be there for you. In other words, as impolite as it sounds, religion allows adults to have that imaginary friend when times call for it. Dawkins speaks of a story of a woman who says she had an imaginary friend as a child who she later had a dream about as an adult where the friend (a sort of Barney-like purple creature) was giving her advice as to how to navigate a crisis in her life. He quite profoundly postulates that this adult extension of childhood friends is at the essence of belief in deities.So, then the question becomes whether or not we can be consoled and inspired while acknowledging that our adult imaginary friend known as God is just as unlikely to exist as any childhood imaginary friend. He suggests we most certainly can and invokes quantum mechanics and an unnamed reference to biocentric perception as the reason why. Basically, we evolved to perceive the world as we do because that's what we needed to perceive in order to successfully navigate it. Yet, there is much in this universe, and other proposed universes that is far too small, too large, too fast, too slow, and whatever else for us to perceive let alone understand. The world we see is such a tiny bit of reality and such a limited understanding of all there is to understand. With science, we can discover realities in which we do not exist and come to understand all the things within our reality that we do not perceive. He uses the amazing analogy of a woman in a burka with only the slit where her eyes are being exposed. He instructs us to imagine that the woman and the burka covering her are miles upon miles tall/long. Because modern science has begun to discover both how long the burka of reality really is and also figuring out ways to understand the rest of the burka, the tiny slit humanity has previously been confined to perceive things from is rapidly opening up. Thus, it becomes apparent to us readers that we can very much be inspired by all these new components of vast, vast reality that there is to be investigated, and we can very much be comforted by increasing our understanding of this vast reality. We can obtain this inspiration and comfort by using science, which yes, does destroy old superstitious dogmas we found comforting in the face of uncertainty from the slit of the burka, but what there is to find, in exchange for giving up the comparatively smaller comfort and inspiration that was the religious placeholder, is so, so much greater than what we got from our delusions. 