God is Not Great

Product Description

In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris's recent bestseller, The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case
against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and
reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry
of the double helix.
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #679 in Books
* Published on: 2007-05-01
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Hardcover
* 307 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Hitchens, one of our great political pugilists, delivers the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. The same contrarian spirit that makes him delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has God placed in the dock. And can he turn a phrase!: "monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents." Hitchens's one-liners bear the marks of considerable sparring practice with believers. Yet few believers will recognize themselves as Hitchens associates all of them for all time with the worst of history's theocratic and inquisitional moments. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling believers' weaker arguments: that faith offers comfort (false comfort is none at all), or has provided a historical hedge against fascism (it mostly hasn't), or that "Eastern" religions are better (nope). The book's real strength is Hitchens's on-the-ground glimpses of religion's worst face in various war zones and isolated despotic regimes. But its weakness is its almost fanatical insistence that religion poisons "everything," which tips over into barely disguised misanthropy. (May 30)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Stephen Prothero

A century and a half ago Pope Pius IX published the Syllabus of Errors, a rhetorical tour de force against the high crimes and misdemeanors of the modern world. God Is Not Great, by the British journalist and professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens, is the atheists' equivalent: an unrelenting enumeration of religion's sins and wickedness, written with much of the rhetorical pomp and all of the imperial condescension of a Vatican encyclical.

Hitchens, who once described Mother Teresa as "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud," is notorious for making mincemeat out of sacred cows, but in this book it is the sacred itself that is skewered. Religion, Hitchens writes, is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." Channeling the anti-supernatural spirits of other acolytes of the "new atheism," Hitchens argues that religion is "man-made" and murderous, originating in fear and sustained by brute force. Like Richard Dawkins, he denounces the religious education of young people as child abuse. Like Sam Harris, he fires away at the Koran as well as the Bible. And like Daniel Dennett, he views faith as wish-fulfillment.

Historian George Marsden once described fundamentalism as evangelicalism that is mad about something. If so, these evangelistic atheists have something in common with their fundamentalist foes, and Hitchens is the maddest of the lot. Protestant theologian John Calvin was "a sadist and torturer and killer," Hitchens writes, and the Bible "contain[s] a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre."

As should be obvious to any reasonable person -- unlike Hitchens I do not exclude believers from this category -- horrors and good deeds are performed by believers and non-believers alike. But in Hitchens's Manichaean world, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Indeed, Hitchens arrives at the conclusion that the secular murderousness of Stalin's purges wasn't really secular at all, since, as he quotes George Orwell, "a totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy." And in North Korea today, what has gone awry is not communism but Confucianism.

Hitchens is not so forgiving when it comes to religion's transgressions. He aims his poison pen at the Dalai Lama, St. Francis and Gandhi. Among religious leaders only the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. comes off well. But in the gospel according to Hitchens whatever good King did accrues to his humanism rather than his Christianity. In fact, King was not actually a Christian at all, argues Hitchens, since he rejected the sadism that characterizes the teachings of Jesus. "No supernatural force was required to make the case against racism" in postwar America, writes Hitchens. But he's wrong. It was the prophetic faith of black believers that gave them the strength to stand up to the indignities of fire hoses and police dogs. As for those white liberals inspired by Paine, Mencken and Hitchens's other secular heroes, well, they stood down.

Hitchens says a lot of true things in this wrongheaded book. He is right that you can be moral without being religious. He is right to track contemporary sexism and sexual repression to ancient religious beliefs. And his attack on "intelligent design" is not only convincing but comical, coursing as it does through the crude architecture of the appendix and our inconvenient "urinogenital arrangements."

What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself.

Hitchens claims that some of his best friends are believers. If so, he doesn't know much about his best friends. He writes about religious people the way northern racists used to talk about "Negroes" -- with feigned knowing and a sneer. God Is Not Great assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery. But it is Hitchens who is the naïf. To read this oddly innocent book as gospel is to believe that ordinary Catholics are proud of the Inquisition, that ordinary Hindus view masturbation as an offense against Krishna, and that ordinary Jews cheer when a renegade Orthodox rebbe sucks the blood off a freshly circumcised penis. It is to believe that faith is always blind and rituals always empty -- that there is no difference between taking communion and drinking the Kool-Aid (a beverage Hitchens feels compelled to mention no fewer than three times).

If this is religion, then by all means we should have less of it. But the only people who believe that religion is about believing blindly in a God who blesses and curses on demand and sees science and reason as spawns of Satan are unlettered fundamentalists and their atheistic doppelgangers. Hitchens describes the religious mind as "literal and limited" and the atheistic mind as "ironic and inquiring." Readers with any sense of irony -- and here I do not exclude believers -- will be surprised to see how little inquiring Hitchens has done and how limited and literal is his own ill-prepared reduction of religion.

Christopher Hitchens is a brilliant man, and there is no living journalist I more enjoy reading. But I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject. In the end, this maddeningly dogmatic book does little more than illustrate one of Hitchens's pet themes -- the ability of dogma to put reason to sleep.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From AudioFile
The author propounds his belief that all religion is not only wrong-headed but dangerous. One doubts the flamboyant journalist will sway those convinced that metaphysical certainty depends on faith, not proof, and that the higher powers are fundamentally good. Others will find his points familiar (if not self-evident), his knowledge wide, his writing graceful, and his sarcasm apt. Like partisans of any description, he ignores inconvenient facts and overstates his case. As narrator, he contributes a pleasantly moderated voice and a listener-friendly British accent. At times, he sounds a bit tired, at other times rushed, but, all in all, he reads well enough, with the added benefit of knowing where the laugh lines are. Y.R. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Customer Reviews

Anger and Mistakes1
I read this book hoping for some new evidence, reason, logic and science. But instead I quickly found two mistakes: one is Abraham (of the Bible fame, not our president) is alleged to threaten suicide (it was murder, actually, of his son), and the comment 'rebuilding of the 2nd Temple' Actually it is the rebuilding of the 1st temple (the 2nd temple was considered a disappointment compared to King Solomon's original temple). According to the author Jesus was a false Messiah and possibly wasn't born. Hmmm. A little common sense here; if you feel Jesus was never born, why make the case that he was a false Messiah?

Short of wondering if the author was pummeled in his youth by some wayward nuns, I am bewildered by the level of anger here toward God. Whoops - forgot, God doesn't exist, does he. Why then is the author shaking his fist at - well - nothing? You can almost imagine those pesky wayward nuns somewhere - shaking their collective heads and murmuring, 'Hey, isn't that the kid we pummeled years ago..." Stay tuned - there may be a new movie coming for the Christmas season: Nuns Gone Wild.

hitchens is not Great1
Assume that the worst book does not exist. Now imagine in your mind what the worst book would be if it existed. Clearly if that book exists in reality, it is worse than the worst book in your mind. But you were imagining the worst book, and we just found a book that is worse than the worst book. This is a contradiction, so the worst book exists, and it is christopher hitchens "god is not great." This was like reading someone's Live Journal. hitchens goes on and on, telling all these anecdotal stories about Thomas Paine and all areas of irrelevant material. Not once did this book require thought to counter any of the tired objections to religion. Page after page, hitchens builds up straw men, bringing out the worst characters in religion and basing entire faiths on these few lousy individuals. hitchens even fails to get basic facts about different faiths correct. It really was pathetic. I began to feel very sorry for him. He is so far out there and understands very little. Finally, hitchens references hardly any of his claims. A few sporadic ones here and there, but the reader cannot verify the bulk of his claims. This is so far removed from being a scholarly work. I am sure I could write a better book on atheism than this.

This is an argument?1
Simply put, Hitchens manages to write about 300 pages without actually making an argument.

As a religious person who has actually talked to atheists, I know that atheist "arguments" regarding religion tend to fall into two categories: actual logical arguments and whining about the evils of religion. Hitchens's book falls firmly in the second camp. None of what he presents is truly "new" to me, and as a result I found the book to be far from stimulating. It didn't make me think through the issues at all. The problem, of course, is that every religion I am aware of has a rather simple explanation for why even religious people commit evil acts. So, not only is the list of religious atrocities dull (because it is far from new), it doesn't do anything to challenge my religious beliefs.

If you want a book that will actually make you think about the issues involved with theistic belief, don't read this one. If you're atheist already, all this book will do is give you a bunch of information that is totally useless, as no religious person will find it either new or convincing. If you're religious, all this book will do is bore you with examples which, though not familiar in the particulars, are certainly just like the typical atheist whining you're used to hearing.

One side point: Hitchens insists on referring to humans as "mammals". While this may technically be true, the effect that it creates is one of anti-humanism. That is, he pushes humans down in terms of their moral value. This is opposed to Richard Dawkins who, while making a similar point, pulls the rest of life UP. Not a big point, just something that I found to be annoying... And not particularly useful if you want to show that atheists can value humanity. From the way Hitchens talks, it sounds like he has little to no respect for his species.

If you want to read a good defense of atheism, don't read this book. Read Dawkins's "The God Delusion". Though I didn't find it to be convincing, it at least gave me arguments that I had to think about.