"God Drives a Flying Saucer" by R L Dione

I love books like this. I love the warped and twisted logic. I love way rhetoric is deployed in place of rationality. And I admire the authors for being able to get a publishing deal for such transparent lunacy.

R L Dione offends scholarly standards of evidence in so many ways:

• The references that he gives for his claims are (deliberately?) uncheckable; for example: 
• “An ancient papyrus from Egypt” (Ch 1)
• “Research at Cornell University has established that ... electromagnetic radiation bypasses the auditory system, directly stimulating the brain, producing a buzzing sensation.” (Ch 4)
• “From recent flying-saucer reports it appears that saucerians can also glow and appear luminous - probably by means of a sterilizing device built into their uniforms.” (Ch 6)
• "Consider, for example, the two satellites of Mars, which many astronomers believe to be artificial.” (Ch 10)
• Sometimes the evidence he offers is completely absence, such as: 
• “UFOs appear and disappear by the simple expediency of adjusting their luminosity and color to blend with the luminosity and color of the background.” (Ch 2)
• “Remarkable heating effects characterize many UFO encounters.” (Ch 4)
• He uses the trope of 'things we don't yet know or understand': "UFOs operate on some electromagnetic principle not yet known to mankind - an electromagnetic principle which perhaps can create and control its own gravitational field.” (Ch 3)
• Alternatively, he uses the argument that 'since you can't prove me wrong I must be right': “theory can be neither proved nor disproved, and since its verification would explain all the flight characteristics of UFOs, thus eliminating the necessity for accusing millions of witnesses of having mass hallucinations or of lying, I can see no justification for assuming that it is in error.” (Ch 3)
• He claims certainty for things that are debatable: (my highlights)
• “Another established fact is that UFOs while in flight sometimes emit a tangible substance that drifts down to the ground." (Ch 4)
• “If the Lady can predict great disasters why can she not predict whether her people will obey? ... It seems obvious, therefore, that she is not supernatural.” (Ch 6) 
• “Surely he’s describing nothing else than a flying saucer” (Ch 7)
• He offers a limited set of alternatives and then dismisses the straw men he has set up, forcing us to choose his favoured alternative without considering the many other possibilities. For example, when discussing the truth or otherwise of miracles, he says that the alternatives are:
• “We can deny the truth of the Bible ...” (Ch 7)
• “We can accept it as true ... claiming supernatural powers are responsible.” (Ch 7)
• “We can accept it as true and explain it as a manifestation of supertechnological devices.” (Ch 7)
• He attacks those he doesn't like ad hominem while credulously believing in that trope of UFOlogists, the 'reliable witness': “Philosophers, other intellectuals and clergyman have bumbled, and continue to bumble, with the idea that the essence of man is a strange mixture of a physical and spiritual being. They bumble, because such a view is inconsistent with reason" (Ch 8)

This book is also distinguished by the author's errors in simple Physics, such as when he confuses mass and weight, so deciding that the "neutralization" of Earth's gravitational field would make a spaceship's inertial mass zero (Ch 3) or when he describes momentum as “the force which throws drivers against windshields in car accidents” (Ch 3)

Other selected quotes:

•  "No system of logic yet devised can resolve the inconsistencies and paradoxes inherent in the belief that man is inhabited by a mystical supernatural and immortal something called a soul.” (Ch 8) 
• “Aristotle was on the right track when he said, ‘ if the eye were a body, Vision would be its soul.’ in other words, the soul is the function of the body: the thoughts, the acts and all the emotions ... but ... the existence of spiritual characteristics, such as emotions, does not validate the dualistic view that man is both spiritual and physical. If it did, then by the same reasoning we could prove that a car or a radio or any other inanimate object is both spiritual and physical.” (Ch 8)
• “Most of us believe that God wants us to live a good life and to believe in Him, for which He will in the end reward us with life everlasting. ... The question is, What does God get out of it?” (Ch 10)
• "God ... brags, He cajoles, and He even threatens us in an attempt to win our faith in Him and our love for Him. ... If the father of a family on earth were to demand love a respect the way that God does of His family, he would be considered a psychopath.” (Ch 10)

Entertaining nonsense. April 2022; 131 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God