Crimes Against Logic is a book that claims to ‘expose the bogus arguments of politicians, priests, journalists, and other serial offenders.’ It has many high reviews, and seems to be regarded as an acceptable book for proving certain logical points about our society today. Below, I’ve detailed my experience with this book, along with giving a brief summary and review.
How I found this book
One random day, I stumbled across a website that sparked an idea. This particular website was simply trying to argue that what it was asserting was true. It used texts to support it’s claims and seemed adamant about what it was trying to get across. However, the arguments simply didn’t seem strong enough.
I figured I should brush up on my logic (aka learn logic from scratch), and did a simple Google search on books to read. Crimes Against Logic came highly recommended, so I gave it a shot. My hope was to learn a basic background of logical principles. That way, I could determine for myself the strength of this website’s arguments based on its reasoning.
Summary
The aim of this book is to shed light on the logical fallacies of the modern day. This is not necessarily a book meant to teach logic, but to apply logical principles to our current lives to expose what could be improved in the world. It takes several different political, religious, and other popular actions of today, and gives reasoning why several practices are flawed. The author, Jamie Whyte, was raised in New Zealand. He lived in London at the time writing this book. Many of the topics discussed are focused on the United Kingdom.
Review
If you read my post on how I read a book, you may assume this summary is vague as not to give too much of the book details away. However, there is another reason for my lack of detail: this is one of those books that was so unpleasant to read, that I didn’t find enough information in it worthy enough to be taken down.
I struggled to finish this book. The only reason I pushed through, however, was to be able to say I read the entire thing so that my review could not be invalidated. There are so many off-putting sentiments, it made me question what the point even was. It was clear that the author was an atheist, as there were many points about the illegitimacy of God. Overall, I would not recommend this book to anyone. I didn’t gain a single thing from it other than confusion and frustration.
