God Is Not Great

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God is not Great  
Author Christopher Hitchens
Country United States
Language English
Subject(s) Religion
Publisher Twelve Books
Publication date May 1, 2007
Media type hardcover, paperback, audio book
Pages 307
ISBN 978-0-446-57980-3

God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) is a book-length critique of religion by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens. It was published in the United Kingdom as God is Not Great: The Case Against Religion.

In the book, Hitchens contends that religion is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." Hitchens supports his position with a mixture of personal stories, documented historical anecdotes and critical analysis of religious texts. His commentary focuses mainly on the Abrahamic religions, although he also touches on other religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Contents

[edit] Synopsis

[edit] Specific criticisms of religion

 Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (June 2007)

Hitchens' critique of religion comes down to four main points:

  • Religion misrepresents the origins of humankind and the cosmos
  • Religion demands unreasonable suppression of human nature
  • Religion inclines people to violence and blind submission to authority
  • Religion expresses hostility to free inquiry

[edit] Chapter One: Putting It Mildly

Hitchens writes that, at the age of nine, he began to question the teachings of his Bible instructor and began to see critical flaws in apologetic arguments, most notably the argument from design.[1] He then goes on to discuss people who become atheists, saying that some are people who have never believed, whereas others are those who have separately discarded religious traditions; he also asserts that atheists who disagree with each other will eventually side together on whatever the evidence most strongly supports.[2] He briefly discusses why human beings have a tendency towards being "faithful" and argues that religion will remain entrenched in the human consciousness as long as human beings cannot overcome their primitive fears. He ends by saying that he does not want to eradicate religion if those who are religious will "leave him alone", but ultimately, he writes, they are incapable of this.[3]

[edit] Chapter Two: Religion Kills

In this chapter, Hitchens addresses a hypothetical question he was asked on a panel with radio host Dennis Prager: if he were alone in an unfamiliar city at night, and a group of strangers began to approach him, would he feel safer, or less safe, knowing that these men had just come from a prayer meeting? Hitchens answers by listing some "unfamiliar cities" where he may indeed feel threatened if in that particular situation. Citing only cities starting with the letter B, he lists Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad[4], giving detailed descriptions of the tense social and political situations within these particular cities, which he attributes to religion. From this, he writes that he has "not found it a prudent rule to seek help as the prayer meeting breaks up." [5]

Next, he discusses the 1989 fatwa issued on author and friend Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini because of the contents of his book The Satanic Verses[6]; he goes on to criticize several public figures for laying the blame for the incident on Rushdie himself. He also writes about the events following the September 11, 2001 attacks, describing how religion, particularly major religious figures, allowed matters to "deteriorate in the interval between the removal of the Taliban and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."[7]

[edit] Chapter Three: A Short Digression On The Pig

Chapter three's full title is "A Short Digression On The Pig; or, Why Heaven Hates Ham". Hitchens discusses the prohibition on eating pigs ("porcophobia" as Hitchens jokingly calls it) in Judaism, also adopted by Islam.(pp. 37-41) Hitchens writes that this proscription is not just Biblical; even today, he says, Muslim zealots demand that the Three Little Pigs, Miss Piggy, Piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh, and other traditional pets and characters should be "removed from the innocent gaze of their children."(p.41)

[edit] Chapter Four: A Note On Health, To Which Religion May Be Hazardous

In this chapter, Hitchens declares that religions are hostile to treating diseases. He writes that many Muslims saw the polio vaccine as a conspiracy and thus allowed polio to spread.[8] He then goes on to discuss the Catholic Church's response to the spread of HIV in Africa by telling people condoms are ineffective, which he argues contributed to the death toll[9]. He opines that both Catholic and Muslim communities believe that HIV and HPV are punishment for sexual sin — particularly homosexuality[10]. He calls religious leaders "faith healers", and says they are hostile to medicine because it undermines their own position.[11]

He then criticizes the Jewish ritual of circumcision and denounces the traditional African practice of female genital mutilation. He finishes this chapter writing of the religious believers' "wish for obliteration" - for a death in the form of the day of the Apocalypse.

[edit] Chapter Five: The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False

Hitchens begins this chapter by saying that the strong faith that could stand up to any form of reason is long gone. He compares the popular knowledge of the world in Thomas Aquinas' time to what we now know about the world. He uses the example of Laplace ("It works well enough without that hypothesis [God]")[12] to demonstrate that Laplace didn't need God to explain things, and neither do we. He claims that religion becomes obsolete as an explanation when it becomes optional or one among many different beliefs. He concludes by saying that the leap of faith is not one leap; it is a leap that is repeatedly made, and people find it difficult to rely on faith, instead attempting to "prove" God's existence.

[edit] Chapter Six: Arguments From Design

In this chapter, Hitchens writes that Abrahamic religion is used to make people feel like lowly sinners and yet at the same time makes them feel like a creator cares about them, inflating their sense of self-importance. He says that superstition to some extent has a "natural advantage" and discusses a few examples as well as so-called miracles.

He then discusses the design arguments, using examples such as the human body wearing out in old age as bad design. He writes that if evolution had taken a slightly different course, there would be no guarantee at all that organisms remotely like us would ever have existed.

[edit] Chapter Seven: The Nightmare Of The Old Testament

Here Hitchens lists anachronisms and inconsistencies in the Old Testament, and writes that many of the "gruesome, disordered events [...] never took place."(p.102) He writes that the Pentateuch was an "ill-carpentered fiction, bolted into place well after the nonevents that it fails to describe convincingly or even plausibly."(p.104) He points out, for instance, that when Moses orders parents to have their children stoned to death for indiscipline (citing Deuteronomy but no chapter in particular[13]) it is probably a violation of at least one of the very commandments Moses brought down from God, and that Moses "continually makes demented pronouncements."(p.106)

[edit] Chapter Eight: The "New" Testament Exceeds The Evil Of The "Old" One

Hitchens first connects the story of Abraham in the Old Testament with its prediction that "a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son," pointing out where the stories converge, Old Testament to New. Comparing the Testaments, he considers the New Testament "also a work of crude carpentry, hammered together long after its purported events, and full of attempts to make things come out right." He points out that, while H. L. Mencken considered some of the New Testament events to be historically verifiable, Mencken maintained that "most of them [...] show unmistakable signs of having been tampered with."(p.109-110)

Hitchens also outlines the inaccuracy in Luke's attempt to triangulate three world events of the time with Jesus' birth (viz, the census ordered by Caesar of the entire Roman world, the reign of King Herod in Judea and that of Quirinius as governor of Syria). He further states that there is no record of any Augustan census by any Roman historian (only by Josephus, which was six years after Jesus' birth was supposed to have taken place). In addition Hitchens states that Herod died in 4 B.C., and that Quirinius was not governor of Syria during his tenure.

Hitchens refers to the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ as a "soap-opera film," saying that Gibson "adheres to a crackpot and schismatic Catholic sect" (Traditionalist Catholicism) and that his film tirelessly attempted to blame the death of Jesus on the Jews. Hitchens claims that Gibson did not realize that the four Gospels were not at all historical records, and that they had multiple authors, all being written many decades after the Crucifixion - and moreover, that they do not agree on anything "of importance" (e.g., on the Virgin birth, the genealogy of Jesus). He claims many contradictions in this area.(pp.110-112)

The author contends that the many "contradictions and illiteracies" of the New Testament, while written about at great lengths in other books, have never been explained except to excuse them as "metaphor" and "a Christ of faith." He states that the "feebleness" of the Bible is a result of the fact that until recently, Christians faced with arguments against the logic or factualness of the Bible could simply burn or silence those posing such "inconvenient questions."(p.115)

Hitchens points out the problematic implications of the scriptural proclamation "he that is without sin among you, let him cast a first stone" with regard to the practical legislation of retributive justice: "if only the non-sinners have the right to punish, then how could an imperfect society ever determine how to prosecute offenders?" Of the woman whom Jesus saved from the stoning (she having been charged with adultery), the author posits that Jesus thus forgives her of sheer sexual promiscuity, and if this be the case, the lesson has ever since been completely misunderstood.(p.121) Closing the chapter(p.122) he suggests that advocates of religion have faith alone to rely on — nothing else — and calls on them to "be brave enough" to admit they have nothing more to support their case.

[edit] Remaining chapters

Chapters 9-19:

  • Chapter Nine: The Koran Is Borrowed From Both Jewish and Christian Myths
  • Chapter Ten: The Tawdriness Of The Miraculous And The Decline Of Hell
  • Chapter Eleven: Religion's Corrupt Beginnings
  • Chapter Twelve: A Coda: How Religions End
  • Chapter Thirteen: Does Religion Make People Behave Better?
  • Chapter Fourteen: There Is No "Eastern" Solution
  • Chapter Fifteen: Religion As An Original Sin
  • Chapter Sixteen: Is Religion Child Abuse?
  • Chapter Seventeen: An Objection Anticipated
  • Chapter Eighteen: A Finer Tradition: The Resistance Of The Rational
  • Chapter Nineteen: In Conclusion: The Need for a New Enlightenment

[edit] Critical reception

Liberal critic Michael Kinsley, in the New York Times Book Review, lauded Hitchens' "... logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever." He concluded that "Hitchens has outfoxed the Hitchens watchers by writing a serious and deeply felt book, totally consistent with his beliefs of a lifetime."[14]

Bruce DeSilva of the Associated Press says: "This time he's outdone himself ... A spate of atheist screeds has arrived in the bookstores lately, but Hitchens' may be the best since Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), laying out the essential arguments with force and precision ... He makes his case in the elegant yet biting prose we have come to expect from him ... Hitchens is the reincarnation of H. L. Mencken, the penultimate social critic of the first half of the 20th century, who used words like gunshots and considered most Americans 'boobs'." DeSilva goes on to say "Hitchens has nothing new to say, although it must be acknowledged that he says it exceptionally well."[15][16]

God Is Not Great was not without detractors, however. Michael Medved called the book "a maddening combination of stimulation and sloppiness, erudition and ignorance, provocation and puerility". He concluded that the "sly distortions and grotesque errors that appear in every chapter of his work demonstrate the author’s carelessness and arrogance" and that, "Beyond its factual errors and obvious misstatements," Hitchens' book "provides a frequently primitive and juvenile characterization of religious belief."[17] Dennis Prager, meanwhile, said that Hitchens misrepresented his argument about "Bible class" in favor of the Christian faith.[18]

Responding to Hitchens' statement that "all attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule", Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution quotes a paleontologist that Hitchens himself commended — Stephen Jay Gould. After a survey showed half of all scientists are religious, Gould said that "Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs — and equally compatible with atheism."[19] For his part, Ross Douthat remarked that "Hitchens's argument proceeds principally by anecdote, and at his best he is as convincing as that particular style allows, which is to say not terribly."[20]

The religious conservative critic Frank Brennan described the book as an affirmation of Hitchens' Marxist origins in contrast to his labeling by some critics as a neoconservative:

For all of the claims that Christopher Hitchens has abandoned his earlier Leftist proclivities, there is at least one point at which he remains an orthodox Marxist. Some would argue that his book is a straightforward reiteration of Marx’s own critique of religion, albeit in a more bombastic fashion."[21]

The book was announced as a nominee for the National Book Award on October 10, 2007.[22]

[edit] Sales history

The book was published on May 1, 2007, and within a week had reached #2 on the Amazon.com bestsellers list[23] (behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), and reached #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list in its third week.[24]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great, page 3
  2. ^ God Is Not Great, page 5
  3. ^ God Is Not Great, page 13
  4. ^ God Is Not Great, page 18
  5. ^ God Is Not Great, page 28
  6. ^ God Is Not Great, page 28
  7. ^ God Is Not Great, page 31
  8. ^ God Is Not Great, pages 44-45
  9. ^ God Is Not Great, pages 45-6
  10. ^ God Is Not Great, page 49
  11. ^ God Is Not Great, page 47
  12. ^ God Is Not Great, pages 66-67
  13. ^ See Deuteronomy 21:18-21, "If a man have a stubborn and unruly son [...] the people of the city shall stone him"
  14. ^ Michael Kinsley, The New York Times Review of Books
  15. ^ "Dallas News, "Hitchens blames religion for -- well, you name it"". http://religion.beloblog.com/archives/2007/04/hitchens_blames_religion_for_w_1.html. 
  16. ^ "Critical Praise, God Is Not Great (Hardcover)". http://www.hachettebookgroupusa.com/authors/69/3732/critical_praise.html. 
  17. ^ Hitchens vs. God by Michael Medved
  18. ^ You're in a Bad Neighborhood and 10 Men Approach You... by Dennis Prager
  19. ^ The New New Atheism by Peter Berkowitz
  20. ^ Lord Have Mercy: A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Ross Douthat
  21. ^ Frank Brennan answers atheist manifestos, retrieved June 01, 2007.
  22. ^ Associated Press
  23. ^ Amazon.com book page - search for sales rank for current position
  24. ^ New York Times Bestseller list

[edit] External links

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