God Is Not Great... a book u need to check out!!!

[uglyknuckles]

I just bought this book and I'm only about 30 pages into it and it's already a must-read. God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. It isn't light reading, it's the first serious philosophy book I've bitten into in a good many years. If you have a functioning intellect, you should read it. The subject is and has always been relevant, but it's especially so here in the 21st Century when the entire world is blowing up because of some shit we should have gotten past 400 years ago.

[bastard]

AMEN!!!

[gots0]

I'm adding it to my "to read" list. Thanks T

[jainitai]

I saw this guy on the Daily Show (Comedy Central) about a month ago. He was just some chump atheist who wants to be God himself. I always wonder why people go on the Daily Show or the Colbert Report thinking they're going to be seriously interviewed. The hosts just mock them and make them look like idiots. But that guy really just was an idiot. Sorry, T. I understand the point that religion has often been mis-used in the name of gaining power or wealth, etc. but to go to the other extreme and say that all forms of religion and spirituality are useless and unnecessary is just atheistic propoganda.

[uglyknuckles]

You're judging a serious piece of non-fiction based on interviews with the author on Comedy Central?

Don't worry, J. I'm sure god is still gonna reach down out the sky and snatch you up by the hair when the end is nigh...

seriously, this isn't a piece of Michael Moore style propaganda. You guys need to check this out. Hitchens is taking shit apart. And he spares no religion or psuedo-religion. Western or Eastern. This cat is sharp, but he *will* hurt your feelie-weelies if you have a lot invested in the idea that one or another particular man-made superhero has got your back and you are heavily dependant on circular logic to "prove" it.

I'd love to see a major religious leader try to debate this guy. And he doesn't say religion is useless. It's more a question of who exactly is it useful to?

[brian]

He appears on Bill Maher's HBO show often. Very straightforward. I definitely will check this out.

[Red Dog]

Here's an extremely interesting review of the book from The Washington Post:

****************************************************

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 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.

****************************************************

I might have to check this book out and see for myself. Seems interesting at any rate.

Let us know what you think about it after you're done, UK.

[uglyknuckles]

I'm almost finished. So far I have three problems with Hitchens, one of them being that the book is -as mentioned in the above review- extremely condescending and superior. But overall I've been laughing as I read it and as Hitchens point by point slays these people and uses their own "holy" books to do so.

Other than correctly pointing out Hitchens' condescending attitude, the reviewer above is full of it. I would guess he's someone whose feelie-weelies just can't hack relentless application of reason to long-held beliefs about religion.

I could tear him a new asshole if I had the time. But he does a few things that I can point to just off the top of my head to give an idea of why his review is useless. He -in one of the oldest tricks in the hatchet-man's book- uses quotations out of context. In another old-school move, he tries to make out like the book is about something it's not about, namely secularism and the problems with it. What he doesn't mention is that the burden of proof is on the religious people to give some kind of rational excuse for us to take giant leaps of "faith" and completely ignore the history of religion and its books and proponents. We don't have to prove that god doesn't exist. The believers and kneelers have to prove that he does.

This book isn't about secular issues, it's about religion poisoning everything. And Hitchens is just straight out schooling people.

Another thing this reviewer does that gives you an inkling of how disingenuous he is; he makes up new definitions for shit. This is another old trick of the trade used when you can't back your shit up with facts. This reviewer wants to tell us what the nature of religion is really about. Like it's been a mystery all these years up 'till now! Until this review.

he also falls back on tenuious and subjective points of emotional or personal belief like the sheer devotion to such things in and of itself is enough to render fact into fiction and vice versa.

I have a few problems with hitchens and I'll lay 'em out later, but there is a serious problem inbedded in every paragraph of this "review". It's not a review, it's an editorial that employs so many classic methods of distorting and marginalizing something you disagree with to the point that you have to conclude the dude's being intentionally misleading and mendacious.

[jainitai]

Say...I thought that review was brilliant! ;D

[uglyknuckles]

Full disclosure:

while reading just now I found problems #4 & #5 with Hitchens. I just caught him doing some of the same shit that I just busted out the reviewer for.

these problems, however, only go toward making me think Hitchens is prolly an asshole. Nothing so far to disprove that god is in fact NOT great or that religion does anything but POISON everything.

[uglyknuckles]

Ultimately I'd give this book two, maybe two and a half, stars out of five. Objectively I can't say it's worth the $24 I paid for it or the $12-$14 that it'll cost when issued in paperback. Hitchens comes off as a real prick, and that's hard to do when I essentially share most of his opinions. He launches unsubstantiated and vitriolic personal attacks on Billy Graham, Mel Gibson and others. He does not list his sources for much of what he states as "fact." They may indeed *be* facts, in a few cases I know that they are because of other books and references I've studied, but the paltry selection of references he lists and the absence of footnoted sources is generally not a good sign.

It gets worse and more personal as you get toward the end.

In the final analysis, this book is just another to put on the shelf of works that destroy religion. It's not hard to do really and has been done better by Bertrand Russell, Thomas Paine, Nietzsche and many others. Why should you pay $24 for a book containing information you could discover for yourself in a couple nights of internet research?

We know that religion is man-made and that the holy books are all cobbled together patchworks of ancient myth and proverbs compiled hundreds of years after the "events" they supposedly document by flawed humans and that the believers have been murdering each other for thousands of years because they can't agree on what particular pieces of writing should make it into the "real" bible, koran, etc and because they can't agree what the shit really means anyway. We know the atrocities committed in the name of various gods. We know religious people get eaten alive in debates. We know it's essentially fear of death that validates various "faiths".

We know because of all the other books and essays that have put the idea of a benevolent god to rest.

The only reason I'd recommend this book is if you haven't already spent years questioning faith and researching it in the written words of the world's greatest thinkers. This book is a good, concise source of information for novice agnostics or atheists.

Few people of faith will read this book because, if you can take a bunch of bullshit on "faith" in the first place, you're not going to check out a book that really just tears everything you believe apart. You can't seriously reason with believers and kneelers anyway.

So, who is this book for? Non-believers don't need it if they have watched the world work with open eyes and done a little reading before. And believers are too emotionally involved and have too much invested in leaning on that crutch to objectively injest this material. That's even *if* you could get a person of faith to pull their heads up out of the sand and agree to consider it.

So, it's a two and a half star -and that's being generous- diatribe written by a condescending asshole for the novice skeptics out there.

and that's all I gots ta say!

Tony

[Red Dog]

Thanks for taking the time to share your review, UK.

[gots0]

I'm taking this off my "to read" list. Thanks T

[uglyknuckles]

gots0 said:

I'm taking this off my "to read" list. Thanks T

yeah, you can get Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason" and Bertrand Russell's "Why I'm not a Christian" for a fraction of the price. Hell, that stuff's so old it's prolly in the publc domain.

[godless]

jainitai said:

I saw this guy on the Daily Show (Comedy Central) about a month ago. He was just some chump atheist who wants to be God himself. I always wonder why people go on the Daily Show or the Colbert Report thinking they're going to be seriously interviewed. The hosts just mock them and make them look like idiots. But that guy really just was an idiot. Sorry, T. I understand the point that religion has often been mis-used in the name of gaining power or wealth, etc. but to go to the other extreme and say that all forms of religion and spirituality are useless and unnecessary is just atheistic propoganda.

First of all, you are so far off the mark about Hitchens I almost did a spit take with my Diet Dr. Pepper reading your post. Hitchens may say things you and other theistic religious people do not like to hear(see: His dismantling of Mother Teresa in The Missionary Position) but he is one of the sharper intellects addressing the subject, along with Shermer, Randi, Dawkins and Harris.

Secondly, the old chestnut that "Religion is often misused but is not, itself "bad"." does not wash. It is akin to saying "Sure SOME gangbangers have committed murders and such but it does not mean that gangbanging itself is a bad thing.".

What GOOD does religion provide? By that I mean what 'good' is brought about by religion that cannot be had WITHOUT religion? Charity? Bill Gates is the biggest contributor towards charity(world health issues mainly) the world has ever seen and he is an atheist.
Mother Teresa, by contrast, exploited the children of Calcutta to further her career and kept millions of dollars in stolen money(from the Savings & Loans scandal) which she KNEW was stolen!

Community? There are a million and one ways to bond, socially without worshiping an invisible/imaginary patriarch. So what is there in favor of keeping religion around?