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: #420 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 307 pages

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's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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

A must-read for the inquisitive mind
A tour de force for the skeptical mind. His unrelenting style catches some off guard and offends many believers, but his conclusions are unassailable. If you have any interest in religion, God is Not Great has something for you. Though not for the faint of heart (Chapter 5 is titled "The Metaphysical Claims of Religion are False"), anyone with an open mind and an appreciation for great writing will have a hard time putting this one down. A thought provoking read for both believers and non-believers alike (though it's polemic style is unlikely to convert any.)

Great Is Not God
I'm something of a Hitchens fan. I enjoy his books, as much for their unimpeachable grammar as for their arguments. The man has a solid intellect. But he seems to give little creedence to the way religion is actually lived by average people.

On the one hand, I resent my Catholic upbringing. The classical notion of God as an anthropomorphic father figure arbitrating our conduct and dispensing rewards and punishment is a complete fallacy, surprise surprise. Yes there's dogma and superstition, who'd have guess?

But then there's people like my mom, who attends mass every Sunday and is active in the church. She's not dogmatic. She doesn't proselytize. She definitely believes in heaven and hell and I don't, but her beliefs don't threaten me in any way. For her it's a community thing. A way to feel connected to her neighbors and bake cookies and listen to Father Jim tell bad jokes about the Chicago Bears. For her it's a crutch maybe, but we all prop ourselves up with illusions of one sort or another.

Fundamentalism is dangerous, and no rational person needs a book to point that out. But how is middle-American, middle-minded, mainstream Christianity a pernicious social ill?

One other point:
A major theme in the atheist argument, (which I on the whole support) goes like this: Religion is responsible for some of the worst atrocities in history. These evils outweigh any good in a religious tradition.

For me, the interesting question is not whether the evil outweighs the good, but whether said atrocities would have been committed anyway in the absence of religious motive. Both questions are hypothetical, granted, and useless for anything other than intellectual masturbation, but the same could be said for on-line book reviews.

I personally feel that religion is used to justify and rationalize crimes, but that the main motive is usually wealth. The colonization of Africa and the New World was marketed as an attempt to save souls, but the main prize was land and natural resources. Perhaps religion made it palatable, but 'free trade' and 'global commerce' would have sufficed just as well.

This is going on my top shelf...
I save my highest shelf for only my most favorite, treasured books. Hitchens' latest, _God Is Not Great_, is certainly one of these. Not only are his well-argued views fascinating to read, they are also a *pleasure* to read due to his gifted, fluid, attention-holding writing style.

My only criticism of the book would be that he does, occasionally, come off as arrogant and omniscient when it comes to speaking of those who are believers. Among my family and friends, I am virtually alone as a non-believer, and am sensitive to and respectful of their beliefs. I don't like to see those beliefs unnecessarily belittled, but perhaps I will change my mind as I age. All of that said, this one criticism isn't enough for me not to give his book five stars.

It is unfortunate that more people on the other side of the religion debate aren't actually reading this. Like other reviewers who loved this book, I strongly suspect that many of the people who vitriolically trash it probably haven't even read it and are just displaying an emotional reaction. Personally, I believe this is just a microcosm of what we see in Western society today, and perhaps the world over: It seems like more and more people are less willing to read about or listen to viewpoints that oppose their own. We all have a tendency toward this, of course. It takes effort and intellectual fortitude to fight this tendency and expose oneself to thoughts that don't echo our own. I say that from personal experience.

I hope Hitchens continues to write and expound upon all sorts of topics until he draws his last breath. What a beautiful mind.