God is not great How religion poisons everything

Christopher Hitchens

Book - 2007

"A case against religion and a description of the ways in which religion is man-made"--Provided by the publisher.

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

200/Hitchens
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 200/Hitchens Checked In
Subjects
Published
New York : Twelve 2007.
Language
English
Main Author
Christopher Hitchens (-)
Edition
1st ed
Physical Description
307 p.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780446697965
9780446579803
  • 1. Putting It Mildly
  • 2. Religion Kills
  • 3. A Short Digression on the Pig; or, Why Heaven Hates Ham
  • 4. A Note on Health, to Which Religion Can Be Hazardous
  • 5. The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False
  • 6. Arguments from Design
  • 7. Revelation: The Nightmare of the "Old Testament
  • 8. The "New" Testament Exceeds the Evil of the "Old" One
  • 9. The Koran Is Borrowed from Both Jewish and Christian Myths
  • 10. The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell
  • 11. "The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin": Religion's Corrupt Beginnings
  • 12. A Coda: How Religions End
  • 13. Does Religion Make People Behave Better?
  • 14. There Is No "Eastern" Solution
  • 15. Religion as an Original Sin
  • 16. Is Religion Child Abuse?
  • 17. An Objection Anticipated: The Last-Ditch "Case" Against Secularism
  • 18. A Finer Tradition: The Resistance of the Rational
  • 19. In Conclusion: The Need for a New Enlightenment
  • Afterword
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
  • Index
  • Reading Group Guide
Review by Choice Review

Despite minor mistakes like the alleged assassination of "the elected president of India," this is an eloquent atheist manifesto. It provides anecdotal proofs for the charges leveled against religions. Its litany of arguments that religions have been blind and brutal throughout history should make atheists jump with joy. A more appropriate title for the book would be Religions Are Not Great. Some of the persuasive paragraphs are cheapened by ad hominem attacks using words like "fools" and "frauds." The epithet stupid is used half a dozen times. Like a garbage collector's report, the items listed are all valid, but the religiously inclined might argue that journalist Hitchens imagines that's all there is to religion. He writes, however, not with the intention to falsify, but with the religious conviction that he has the whole truth on the subject. This is to be expected from one who does not seem to have experienced the aesthetic and uplifting dimensions of religion that have touched millions over the ages. With all that, in the context of the abominations that have been, and still are perpetrated in the name of God and religion, this book can serve as an eye-opener for the uninformed and the uninitiated. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through graduate students; general readers. V. V. Raman emeritus, Rochester Institute of Technology

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

OBSERVERS of the Christopher Hitchens phenomenon have been expecting a book about religion from him around now. But this impressive and enjoyable attack on everything so many people hold dear is not the book we were expecting. First in London 30 or more years ago, then in New York and for the last couple of decades in Washington, Hitchens has established himself as a character. This character draws on such familiar sources as the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene; the leftist politics of the 1960s (British variant); and - of course - the person of George Orwell. (Others might throw in the flower-clutching Bunthorne from Gilbert and Sullivan's "Patience," but that is probably not an intentional influence.) Hitchens is the bohemian and the swell, the dashing foreign correspondent, the painstaking literary critic and the intellectual engagé. He charms Washington hostesses but will set off a stink bomb in the salon if the opportunity arises. His conversation sparkles, not quite effortlessly, and if he is a bit too quick to resort to French in search of le mot juste, his jewels of erudition, though flashy, are real. Or at least they fool me. Hitchens was right to choose Washington over New York and London. His enemies would like to believe he is a fraud. But he isn't, as the very existence of his many enemies tends to prove. He is self-styled, to be sure, but no more so than many others in Washington - or even in New York or London - who are not nearly as good at it. He is a principled dissolute, with the courage of his dissolution: he enjoys smoking and drinking, and not just the reputation for smoking and drinking - although he enjoys that too. And through it all he is productive to an extent that seems like cheating: 23 books, pamphlets, collections and collaborations so far; a long and often heavily researched column every month in Vanity Fair; frequent fusillades in Slate and elsewhere; and speeches, debates and other public spectacles whenever offered. The big strategic challenge for a career like this is to remain interesting, and the easiest tactic for doing that is surprise. If they expect you to say X, you say minus X. Consistency is foolish, as the man said. (Didn't he?) Under the unwritten and somewhat eccentric rules of American public discourse, a statement that contradicts everything you have ever said before is considered for that reason to be especially sincere, courageous and dependable. At The New Republic in the 1980s, when I was the editor, we used to joke about changing our name to "Even the Liberal New Republic," because that was how we were referred to whenever we took a conservative position on something, which was often. Then came the day when we took a liberal position on something and we were referred to as "Even the Conservative New Republic." As this example illustrates, among writers about politics, the surprise technique usually means starting left and turning right. Trouble is, you do this once and what's your next party trick? Christopher Hitchens had seemed to be solving this problem by turning his conversion into an ideological "Dance of the Seven Veils." Long ago he came out against abortion. Interesting! Then he discovered and made quite a kosher meal of the fact that his mother, deceased, was Jewish, which under Jewish law meant he himself was Jewish. Interesting!! (He was notorious at the time for his antiZionist sympathies.) In the 1990s, Hitchens was virulently, and somewhat inexplicably, hostile to President Bill Clinton. Interesting!!! You would have thought that Clinton's decadence - the thing that bothered other liberals and leftists the most - would have positively appealed to Hitchens. Finally and recently, he became the most (possibly the only) intellectually serious non-neocon supporter of George W. Bush's Iraq war. Interesting!!!! Where was this train heading? Possibly toward an open conversion to mainline conservatism and quick descent into cliché and demagoguery (the path chosen by Paul Johnson, a somewhat similar British character of the previous generation). But surely there was time for a few more intellectual adventures before retiring to an office at the Hoover Institution or some other nursing home of the mind. One obvious possibility stood out: Hitchens, known to be a fervid atheist, would find God and take up religion. The only question was which flavor he would choose. Embrace Islam? Too cute. Complete the half-finished Jewish script? Become a Catholic, following the path well trodden by such British writers as Waugh and Greene? Or - most daring and original - would he embrace the old Church of England (Episcopalianism in America) and spend his declining years writing about the beauty of the hymns, the essential Britishness of village churchyards, the importance of protecting religion from the dangers of excessive faith, and so on? Well, ladies and gentlemen, Hitchens is either playing the contrarian at a very high level or possibly he is even sincere. But just as he had us expecting minus X, he confounds us by reverting to X. He has written, with tremendous brio and great wit, but also with an underlying genuine anger, an all-out attack on all aspects of religion. Sometimes, instead of the word "religion," he refers to it as "god-worship," which, although virtually a tautology (isn't "object of worship" almost a definition of a god?), makes the practice sound sinister and strange. Hitchens is an old-fashioned village atheist, standing in the square trying to pick arguments with the good citizens on their way to church. The book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever. How could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all? Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments, and if they did know, why was this such a wonderful gift? On a more somber note, how can the "argument from design" (that only some kind of "intelligence" could have designed anything as perfect as a human being) be reconciled with the religious practice of female genital mutilation, which posits that women, at least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect after all? Whether sallies like these give pause to the believer is a question I can't answer. And all the logical sallies don't exactly add up to a sustained argument, because Hitchens thinks a sustained argument shouldn't even be necessary and yet wouldn't be sufficient. To him, it's blindingly obvious: the great religions all began at a time when we knew a tiny fraction of what we know today about the origins of Earth and human life. It's understandable that early humans would develop stories about gods or God to salve their ignorance. But people today have no such excuse. If they continue to believe in the unbelievable, or say they do, they are morons or lunatics or liars. "The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal," he remarks, unsympathetically. Although Hitchens's title refers to God, his real energy is in the subtitle: "religion poisons everything." Disproving the existence of God (at least to his own satisfaction and, frankly, to mine) is just the beginning for Hitchens. In fact, it sometimes seems as if existence is just one of the bones Hitchens wants to pick with God - and not even the most important. If God would just leave the world alone, Hitchens would be glad to let him exist, quietly, in retirement somewhere. Possibly the Hoover Institution. Hitchens is attracted repeatedly to the principle of Occam's razor: that simple explanations are more likely to be correct than complicated ones. (E.g., Earth makes a circle around the Sun; the Sun doesn't do a complex roller coaster ride around Earth.) You might think that Occam's razor would favor religion; the biblical creation story certainly seems simpler than evolution. But Hitchens argues effectively again and again that attaching the religious myth to what we know from science to be true adds nothing but needless complication. FOR Hitchens, it's personal. He is a great friend of Salman Rushdie, and he reminds us that it wasn't just some crazed fringe Muslim who threatened Rushdie's life, killed several others and made him a virtual prisoner for the crime of writing a novel. Religious leaders from all the major faiths, who disagree on some of the most fundamental questions, managed to put aside their differences to agree that Rushdie had it coming. (Elsewhere, Hitchens notes tartly that if any one of the major faiths is true, then the others must be false in important respects - an obvious point often forgotten in the warm haze of ecumenism.) Hitchens's erudition is on display - impressively so, and perhaps sometimes pretentiously so. In one paragraph, he brings in Stephen Jay Gould, chaos theory and Saul Bellow; pronounces the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" "engaging but abysmal" (a typical Hitchens aside: cleverly paradoxical? witlessly oxymoronic? take your pick) in the way it explains to a "middle-brow audience" Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; and winds down through a discussion of the potential of stem cells. Nevertheless, and in spite of all temptations, he has written an entire book without a single reference to Sir Isaiah Berlin, the fox or the hedgehog. But speaking of foxes, Hitchens has outfoxed the Hitchens watchers by writing a serious and deeply felt book, totally consistent with his beliefs of a lifetime. And God should be flattered: unlike most of those clamoring for his attention, Hitchens treats him like an adult. Hitchens is an old-fashioned (and very entertaining) village atheist, trying to pick arguments with the good citizens on their way to church. Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time magazine.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

God is getting bad press lately. Sam Harris' The End of Faith (2005) and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (2006) have questioned the existence of any spiritual being and met with enormous success. Now, noted, often acerbic journalist Hitchens enters the fray. As his subtitle indicates, his premise is simple. Not only does religion poison everything, which he argues by explaining several ways in which religion is immoral, but the world would be better off without religion. Replace religious faith with inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas, he exhorts. Closely reading major religious texts, Hitchens points to numerous examples of atrocities and mayhem in them. Religious faith, he asserts, is both result and cause of dangerous sexual repression. What's more, it is grounded in nothing more than wish fulfillment. Hence, he believes that religion is man-made, and an ethical life can be lived without its stamp of approval. With such chapter titles as "Religion Kills" and "Is Religion Child Abuse?" Hitchens intends to provoke, but he is not mean-spirited and humorless. Indeed, he is effortlessly witty and entertaining as well as utterly rational. Believers will be disturbed and may even charge him with blasphemy (he questions not only the virgin birth but the very existence of Jesus), and he may not change many minds, but he offers the open-minded plenty to think about. --June Sawyers Copyright 2007 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

In 2002, Hitchens appeared before a Vatican committee in the nonofficial capacity of advocatus diaboli, or "devil's advocate," to argue against the beatification of Mother Teresa. In his latest best-selling book, he adopts a similar role to articulate his case against the relevance and utility of religious belief. Once a budding theologian in short pants, the young Hitchens revolted against all things religious when one of his teachers suggested that God made vegetation green because it was more pleasing to the human eye than any other color. This teacher of firm but obtuse faith, by the author's calculation, set him firmly on the road to atheism. Hitchens takes all religions to task for their willful disregard of scientific fact, common sense, and even basic human decency. He is at his most entertaining and provocative when confronting particular faiths (his depiction of the rise of Mormonism and the canonization of the Muslim scriptures in particular), but his relentless dismantling of the creationist, or intelligent design, movement provides more substantial fare, as does his defense of a wholly secular morality, a theme that informs each chapter of the book. Given the levels of violence, intolerance, and oppression committed by and in the name of religion, Hitchens argues, the claim that religion makes humanity better--and, conversely, that the lack of religious belief destroys any foundation for a functional morality--remains a spurious one. Hitchens also proves to be a more than capable reader; his wit, erudition, and passionate unbelief could not have been conveyed as compellingly by a surrogate, though perhaps his reading of the introductory quotations that head many of the book's chapters might have been rendered with a little more enthusiasm. Highly recommended for all general collections.--Philip Bader, Pasadena, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Put an -ism onto it, and whatever it is, noted polemicist and contrarian Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War, 2005, etc.) is likely to decimate it. So he reveals in this pleasingly intemperate assault on organized religion. Hitchens opens by recalling an epistemological crisis. Why, if God was great, did he need to be praised "so incessantly for doing what came to him naturally"? If Jesus could heal the blind, why didn't he do away with blindness? Such doubts arrive to all proper questioners; sometimes they turn into C.S. Lewis or Malcolm Muggeridge, sometimes they turn into committed atheists. Hitchens, forthrightly in the latter camp, offers "four irreducible objections to religious faith" at the outset, namely that religion misrepresents human origins and those of the universe at large; that owing to this, religion combines "the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism"; that religion suppresses sexuality to a dangerous degree; and that religion is a species of wishful-thinking. And the author adds another twist of the knife: Religion makes people crazy, violent and ill-behaved. Just ask Salman Rushdie--or Giordano Bruno. Hitchens, a brave grappler quite obviously unafraid of giving offense, cheerfully takes on all comers, from mullahs to commissars to Mahatma Gandhi--and a noted televangelist who once challenged him with a thought experiment in which, in a foreign land, Hitchens is approached by a large group of men. Wouldn't he feel more comfortable, the televangelist asked, to learn that they had just left a religious service? Citing personal experiences in cities only beginning with B--Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Baghdad--Hitchens answers emphatically in the negative. And all that's before taking on Joseph Smith, and Mohammed, and . . . It's clear from page to page that Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, is having a grand time twitting the folks in the white collars and purple dresses, in the turbans and beehives. Like-minded readers will enjoy his arguments, too. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Putting It Mildly If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond disagreement with its author and try to identify the sins and deformities that animated him to write it (and I have certainly noticed that those who publicly affirm charity and compassion and forgiveness are often inclined to take this course), then he or she will not just be quarreling with the unknowable and ineffable creator who-presumably-opted to make me this way. They will be defiling the memory of a good, sincere, simple woman, of stable and decent faith, named Mrs. Jean Watts. It was Mrs. Watts's task, when I was a boy of about nine and attending a school on the edge of Dartmoor, in southwestern England, to instruct me in lessons about nature, and also about scripture. She would take me and my fellows on walks, in an especially lovely part of my beautiful country of birth, and teach us to tell the different birds, trees, and plants from one another. The amazing variety to be found in a hedgerow; the wonder of a clutch of eggs found in an intricate nest; the way that if the nettles stung your legs (we had to wear shorts) there would be a soothing dock leaf planted near to hand: all this has stayed in my mind, just like the "gamekeeper's museum," where the local peasantry would display the corpses of rats, weasels, and other vermin and predators, presumably supplied by some less kindly deity. If you read John Clare's imperishable rural poems you will catch the music of what I mean to convey. At later lessons we would be given a printed slip of paper entitled "Search the Scriptures," which was sent to the school by whatever national authority supervised the teaching of religion. (This, along with daily prayer services, was compulsory and enforced by the state.) The slip would contain a single verse from the Old or New Testament, and the assignment was to look up the verse and then to tell the class or the teacher, orally or in writing, what the story and the moral was. I used to love this exercise, and even to excel at it so that (like Bertie Wooster) I frequently passed "top" in scripture class. It was my first introduction to practical and textual criticism. I would read all the chapters that led up to the verse, and all the ones that followed it, to be sure that I had got the "point" of the original clue. I can still do this, greatly to the annoyance of some of my enemies, and still have respect for those whose style is sometimes dismissed as "merely" Talmudic, or Koranic, or "fundamentalist." This is good and necessary mental and literary training. However, there came a day when poor, dear Mrs. Watts overreached herself. Seeking ambitiously to fuse her two roles as nature instructor and Bible teacher, she said, "So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the color that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange, how awful that would be." And now behold what this pious old trout hath wrought. I liked Mrs. Watts: she was an affectionate and childless widow who had a friendly old sheepdog who really was named Rover, and she would invite us for sweets and treats after hours to her slightly ramshackle old house near the railway line. If Satan chose her to tempt me into error he was much more inventive than the subtle serpent in the Garden of Eden. She never raised her voice or offered violence-which couldn't be said for all my teachers-and in general was one of those people, of the sort whose memorial is in Middlemarch , of whom it may be said that if "things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been," this is "half-owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." Excerpted from God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.