Dallas Lawyer Will Release Excerpts for Book Indicting All Religions

Dallas, TX (PRWEB) May 23, 2008 -- A lawyer with an upcoming book denying the existence of God is releasing excerpts from the work.

In Beyond Reasonable Doubt: A Lawyer's Case for Disbelief in God, Geoff Henley makes a sweeping indictment of scripture and organized religion.

Calling the serpent of Eden a Muppet, the former prosecutor writes that creationist accounts in the Bible and Koran are "bad alibis" that are no more reliable than myths like the Apache creator who descended to Earth on a sun-like disk or Ancient Egypt's god that created the universe by masturbating.

Henley writes that Islam maintains pretensions to realism and calls its efforts to correct clear flaws in Jewish and Christian myths subsequent remedial measures, a term that lawyers use to describe changes a manufacturer makes once a defect has been identified.

But he points out that writers of the Koran could not overcome the desire to personify a supplicant heaven and earth that answer Allah's beck and call.

"Though Muslims pride themselves for rejecting the foolishness of a smooth-talking garden snake causing the ruin of mankind," Henley explains, "they seem quite happy with the notion that heaven and earth, like the Barbie twins scampering to a rock star in a vodka lounge, compliantly mewed to Allah: 'We come, willingly.'"

Henley does not confine his skepticism to creation, though. Taking organized religion to task for everything from the faith to damnation, Henley rebukes religion for not even demanding skeptics to accept everything with blind faith without meeting even lower burdens of proof that the justice system requires for civil litigation, much less the more exacting standard of beyond reasonable doubt employed in criminal offenses.

The former district attorney cites scripture with a number of due process violations. God doesn't just impose absurd sentences; scripture gives inadequate notice of charges for petty, fictitious offenses committed by distant ancestors and unrelated third parties thousands of years in the past.

The Texas lawyer therefore explains that scripture has much in common with the communist government in Pyongyang.

"While not adhering to rabbinical law, North Korea still condemns up to three generations for the crimes of one person," Henley writes. "Though we dismiss such barbarity with a chuckle, anyone who believes God cursed humans because a talking snake tricked earth's only couple has endorsed something more retrograde than the warped brutality of Kim Jong II or any bone-cracking implement of the Spanish Inquisition."

Beyond Reasonable Doubt takes specific aim at faith.

Henley argues that given the threats of damnation and the social pressure provided by religious institutions that faith does not exist. Deriding the gospels as the New Deal and the New Improved Covenant, Henley explains that faith itself is a coercive contract of adhesion.

Like a consumer who cannot negotiate terms of a boilerplate contract with a large corporation, mankind just has to submit. Henley says it is worse, though, because even "inaction, indifference or indecisiveness yield the same result as outright rejection: eternal damnation."

"Take it or leave it," he says. "It's Yahweh or the highway."

The former prosecutor likewise indicts "intelligent design" as junk science. Dubbing Michael Behe and the Discovery Institute Neo-Creats, Henley explains that intelligent design not only fails under the leading Supreme Court precedent Daubert v. Merrell Dow that established the standards for the admissibility of scientific evidence, but the lawyer points out that fundamentalist attacks on Darwinism are little different than the ideological assaults made by Russian and Chinese communists who thought natural selection endorsed capitalism.

The book further takes aim at the Ten Commandments and fundamentalists like former judge Roy Moore who created constitutional controversies with their monuments to the laws the Bible says God gave Moses. Explaining that the Decalogue is steeped in a bloody "sacrificial legislative history" and is borrowed from the Egypt's Book of the Dead, Henley explains that the Alabama judge displayed contempt for the U.S. Constitution and the federal judiciary.

"Moore's sophomoric pseudo martyrdom that resulted in his rightful censure," Henley explains, "was misguided for a more fundamental reason: the substance of the Ten Commandments just isn't worth the drama."

In advance of Beyond Reasonable Doubt, Henley has also composed several YouTube videos depicting human triumph in the wake of tragedy. Set to Wagner's Siegfried's Funeral March, the videos depict natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the Myanmar cyclone and the Lisbon earthquake as well as manmade ones like Osama Bin Laden's attack on 9/11 and Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As in the book, the videos tells audiences that hope come from our families and ourselves and not from some fictitious puppeteer.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt comes at a time when Christians have launched a counteroffensive to atheist bestsellers written by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, while increasing media accounts of agnostic sentiments from sources as diverse as Woody Allen and Albert Einstein.

For a link to the YouTube Videos, click

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTZsQpf0GHc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVh5jl6rb7A&feature=user

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKKKNjbNm8s&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22ZhmGkJ3-8&feature=user

To obtain excerpts of Beyond Reasonable Doubt, contact:

HENLEY & HENLEY, P.C.

Geoff J. Henley

2205 N. Henderson Avenue

Dallas, Texas 75206

(214) 821-0222

ghenley@henleylawpc.com

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