God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
- ISBN13: 9780446697965
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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, i
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(out of 922 reviews)
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Review by Scott Bresinger for God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
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After looking through some of the other customer reviews found here, I was dismayed by the amount of “blog-style” entries: that is, people who may have only glanced at the title or saw Hitchens promoting the book on CNN or YouTube and decided to just speak up, either in support or condemnation. However, if you’re curious about the book and just want to know what to expect, may I humbly offer some actual information?
Hitchens, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, author of books too numerous to mention and contributor to smaller magazines such as Free Inquiry, adds to the recent renaissance of pro-atheist books with his own provocatively-titled contribution. Whereas Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason) sees dire warnings and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion offers a defense of science, Hitchens uses his long experience in journalism to illustrate the madness that results when faith is unchallenged by reason. Dawkins has been criticized for adopting a harsh tone (an assessment I disagree with), but Hitchens is the one who really pours on the anger and witty derision. Some sample chapter titles make it clear he’s playing for keeps:
Chapter two: “Religion Kills”
Chapter Four: “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False”
Chapter Seven: “Revelation: The Nightmare of the Old Testament”
Chapter Eight: “The ‘New’ Testament Exceeds the Evil of the ‘Old’ One”
Chapter Nine: “The Koran is Borrowed From Both Jewish and Christian Myths”
That should give you a pretty good idea of the tone, but the chapter titles prove to be no mere cheap provocations. Drawing on decades (if not centuries) of scholarship that exposes the cobbled-together recipes for the holy books of the three “great” monotheisms, he shows them to be products of a violent time when scientific information about the world was unavailable and most people were entirely illiterate. He then gives modern day examples of how these myths have been put to horrendous use (yes, 9/11 is mentioned). In one section, he revisits the sins of “Agnes Bojaxhiu, an ambitious Albanian nun who had become well-known under the nom de guerre of ‘Mother Teresa’,” which he covered at greater length in his previous controversial expose The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, and reiterates how the “miracles” ascribed to her are so slap-dash and false they’re almost comical.
While he devotes much of his outrage at “the big three” (my phrase), he also offers a chapter titled “There Is No ‘Eastern’ Solution,” which would have to find disagreement with Sam Harris, who argues that many of the spiritual practices of Buddhism, shorn of their supernatural trappings, could be beneficial. Hitchens, ever the realist, wants us to know that history doesn’t bear these claims out.
Hitchens often delivers his ideas like he’s trying to splash his martini across your face at a party–at one point he muses “Why do people keeep saying, ‘God is in the details’? He isn’t in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure and incompetence”–and the result is often thrilling reading. His vitriol can be unnerving sometimes, like when he asks “Is Religion Child Abuse?”, not to mention the full title of his tome. Never trust a book that splashes the word “everything” on its cover; it’s usually a sign that the author is either desperate or foolishly grandiose. After reading the book, I don’t think Hitchens is either, but in his worst moments he shows symptoms. In any event, I’m sure he doesn’t intend this to be a work of (pardon the phrase) “evangelism”–he doensn’t hope to influence even the mildly religious–but like that martini in the face (followed, perhaps, by an olive to the noggin), he wants to deliver a wake-up call. Some may see only a plea for attention, but he would quickly redirect you the the world outside.
Review by Kashyap Deorah for God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
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My favorite part of the book is the last third. By that time Hitchens has made his arguments about how Religion Poisons Everything and is now rebutting the best intellectual arguments against his thesis. What would become of human decency, morality and ethics without religion? How do you address the inherent human need to believe in something and take comfort in a higher power? What are the god-less alternatives and aren’t those institutions as bad or worse? Doesn’t religion provide stability to society by pacifying individuals in times of darkness and uncertainty? It is hard to sum things up and provide sound bytes about something as complex as religion, but my take-away from this book is that any religion (by design) has the ingredients of becoming totalitarian, when successful; and totalitarianism of any kind leads to ultimate power corruption.
Hitchens makes his arguments and rebuts the best counter-arguments with passion and panache. If you are amongst the majority of people in the world – believers – his irreverent sense of humor may lead you to immediately brush him off as a partisan hack; while the unbelievers will get a kick out of each of the thousands of punchlines that Hitchens artfully mumbles. However, if you belong to the third category – an intellectual who chooses to look beyond a bi-polar view of the world when it comes to religion – I would urge patience with Hitchens’ indulgence as a genius linguist (when you have it, it is hard not to flaunt it!) and you will find this book extremely rewarding and will not go un-satiated. If you are seriously debating the merits and demerits of religion as an institution in the society we live in, you have glanced at the perfect place, no matter what your affiliations.
If you are looking for education on the various major religions in the world, their origin, history, interconnection, impact, popularity, etc.; this is NOT the right book for you. The book presupposes basic knowledge about these topics, and on several occasions I felt that I lacked the prior knowledge to appreciate many nuances in Hitchens’ arguments.
Hitchens is no economist, and he does not get into numbers and measurements. But Hitchens is a seasoned intellectual, and does utter the voice of reason grounded in the sound principles of philosophical debate. His knowledge and wisdom about religion are comparable (arguably) with “good” reverends and pastors. The book is written in commentary style, but does have a semi-structured flow to it.
Just like this book lashes out at totalitarianism in the form of religion, I wish someone writes a book lashing out at totalitarianism in its other most ugly form in the modern world – Nationalism.
Review by John E. Johnson for God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
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I am not suprised that religious people are offended by this book as Hitchens’ language can (at times) be aggressive and polarizing when describing the believers of a given faith. To call all believers of a religion thoughtless imbeciles or to call them just plain stupid seems to me out of hand. However, as I read some of the half-baked religious apolagetics being written in the one or two star reviews of his book, perhaps Hitchens was not out of hand at all. (As a side note, to the reviewer who wrote “Christopher Hitchens is NOT great”, you are truely an ignorant moron who has only strengthened the resolve of ‘unbelievers’ with your blind, hypocritical and borderline racist remarks. The very fact that you accept all the criticisms Hitchens had to offer about Islam but you object to his critique of ‘us’ “civilized Christians” (as you put it) only reveals your blind prejudice.)
I think many (if not all) of Hitchens arguments have been presented in the past but as the spectre of religious fundamentalism rises in our modern society perhaps an “anti-theist” revival is in order as well. Though I have to say that Hitchens’ random derision of ‘multiculturalists’ (like Karen Armstrong) because they are too soft on the behaviour of religious people or because they are too sensitive to the beliefs of a given people seems to be counter-productive at best. We live in a diverse society which relies on mutual respect for other peoples cultural beliefs. Reviving a kind of soft Jacobin anti-clericalism does not really seem feasible (or desirable)in this day and age.
Read and buy this book, especialy at the price they are selling it for, but if you are not really interested then read some Voltaire, Hume or Nietszche instead.
Review by Jon Hunt for God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
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Christopher Hitchens, in his hard-hitting and revealing new book, “god is not Great”, has found the courage to say what so many of us have thought for a long time…religion is its own curse and has been a plague endured by millions for centuries. With science and reason as his guide, Hitchens debunks just about everything from god and the Bible to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Mother Teresa and more… and he does it with a breathtaking panache. It’s the best book on this subject I’ve ever read.
No mere bystander when it comes to faith, Hitchens recounts his own associations with religion and how he moved to his current intense feelings about the topic. As a lapsed Christian who has moved towards atheism, I found myself concurring with just about everything he says. Not content to simply disagree with the faith-based crowd, Hitchens lambastes them. Good for him. The chapters in this book are all relevant to 2007 and some really stand out. One chapter entitled “A Note on Health”, gets this book going full steam and another one toward the end, “Is Religion Child Abuse?”, cuts to the quick. The Catholic Church, to Hitchens’s credit, comes under scathing attack…I wish he had written even more about the abuses that this institution has caused.
Hitchens warns about secularism, too, (citing non-religious movements such as Fascism and Communism and the immense suffering they have inflicted). But it is religion itself that Hitchens finds almost intolerable. He closes by saying “religion has run out of justifications…it no longer offers an explanation of anything important”. Bull’s-eye! Religion should be in the business of putting itself out of business.
“god is not Great” is an important book in large part because it demonstrates convincingly that science has trumped religion and continues to, everytime. The depth which Hitchens tackles religion and its ramifications is matched by a compelling narrative style that has become the author’s “signature”. I highly recommend this book for its courage to tell the truth.
Review by Mr. T. J. Rowe for God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
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Hitchens has produced a book which is both timely and scholarly. Scholarly that is in the sense that he has read widely and has had hands on experience with a number of cults and religions, and timely in that the world seems currently to be polarizing into fundamentalism as against atheism. His arguments are well reasoned and supported and will appeal to the faithful, but of course men convinced against their will are of the same opinions still. At times I found the text inclining to the discursive, although this is being somewhat ungenerous, and certaily worth a second reading.