If this is religion, then by all means we should have less of it. 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). 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. God Is Not Great assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticises religious people for believing such foolery.īut it is Hitchens who is the naif. He writes about religious people the way northern racists used to talk about "Negroes" - with feigned knowing, and a sneer. If so, he doesn't know much about his best friends. Hitchens claims that some of his best friends are believers. What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself. He is right to track contemporary sexism and sexual repression to ancient religious beliefs.Īnd 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". He is right that you can be moral without being religious. Hitchens says a lot of true things in this wrongheaded book. As for those white liberals inspired by Paine, Mencken and Hitchens's other secular heroes, well, they stood down. 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. "No supernatural force was required to make the case against racism" in postwar America, writes Hitchens.īut he's wrong. In fact, King was not actually a Christian at all, Hitchens argues, since he rejected the sadism that characterises the teachings of Jesus. But in the gospel according to Hitchens, whatever good King did accrues to his humanism rather than his Christianity. Among religious leaders only Martin Luther King comes off well. He aims his poison pen at the Dalai Lama, St Francis and Gandhi. Hitchens is not so forgiving when it comes to religion's transgressions. 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".Īnd in North Korea today, what has gone awry is not communism but Confucianism. But in Hitchens's Manichaean world, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. 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".Īs 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. If so, these evangelistic atheists have something in common with their fundamentalist foes, and Hitchens is the maddest of the lot. Historian George Marsden once described fundamentalism as evangelicalism that is mad about something. And like Daniel Dennett, he views faith as wish-fulfilment. Like Sam Harris, he fires away at the Koran as well as the Bible. Like Richard Dawkins, he denounces the religious education of young people as child abuse. 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 towards children".Ĭhannelling 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. 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. 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. Stephen Prothero on how Christopher Hitchens got religion fundamentally wrongĪ 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.
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