God Is Not Great

How Religion Poisons Everything

By Christopher Hitchens

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Average Rating: (See all reviews) Format: Hardcover, 307 pages Published In: United States, May 2007 Quantity Available: 430 Ships within 6-10 days Hitchens takes on his biggest subject yet--the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. With insight and wit, he describes the ways in which religion is man-made, immoral, and repressive and argues for a new enlightenment through science and reason. From The Publisher: Christopher Hitchens, described in the "London Observer" as "one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time" takes on his biggest subject yet-the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. With his unique brand of erudition and wit, Hitchens describes the ways in which religion is man-made. "God did not make us," he writes. "We made God." He explains the ways in which religion is immoral: We damage our children by indoctrinating them. It is a cause of sexual repression, violence, and ignorance. It is a distortion of our origins and the cosmos. In the place of religion, Hitchens offers the promise of a new enlightenment through science and reason, a realm in which hope and wonder can be found through a strand of DNA or a gaze through the Hubble Telescope. As Hitchens sees it, you needn't get the blues once you discover the heavens are empty. Publisher: Twelve ISBN: 0446579807 EAN: 9780446579803 Dimensions: 23.67 x 16.23 x 2.72 centimeters (0.52 kg)

Hitchens's approach here is primarily historical, tracing the major religions back to their origins and showing how they were plainly fabricated by divinely uninspired mammals.
Hitchens derives his central arguement from Ludwig Feuerbach's great insight - "God did not create man. Man created God, cobbling him together from a string of half-understood events and rumours".

Do Christians, Jews and Muslims imagine, he asks, that before Moses received the Ten Commandments, he thought murder and theft were good ideas?

Hitchens is less adept when dealing with the next major criticism: what about Stalin and Mao, the atheist mass murderers? Don't they puncture his thesis that "all major confrontations over the right to free thought, free speech, and free inquiry have taken the same form – of a religious attempt to assert the literal and limited mind over the ironic and inquiring one"? He redefines Stalinism and Maoism as political religions which I for one found slightly dissatisfying.

If there is a flaw to this book, it is that Hitchens's atheism sometimes takes on a misanthropic tone. He opens by quoting the 11th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam: "And do you think that unto such as you/ A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew/ God gave a secret?" He jokes at one point that this planet is "a prison and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilisations". It's hard not to think of the mysterious central character in Martin Amis's novel Night Train, who commits suicide because she concludes that this mediocre world can never match her own fabulousness.

Perfect Hitchens sums it all up nicely in this publication. A must read for any atheist or agnostic seeking clarification on all matters pertaining to the God Myth. Hitchens takes us on an historical step by step explanation of the creation of religion by man. He expels any doubts with clear and concise explanations, and examples of the evaluation of the various religions and all its obscure variants. Further more all his arguments are based on solid evidence and scientific facts. There can be no doubt that religion is a man made phenomenon and that its continued existence just perpetuates the lies and deceit that permeate from its very bogus original origins.