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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.
Hitchens contends that organised religion is "[v]iolent,
irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry,
contemptuous of women and coercive toward children", and that
accordingly it "ought to have a great deal on its conscience."
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.
Summary
Hitchens's 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; and
- Religion is hostile to free inquiry.
Critical
reception
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."[1]
Bruce DeSilva of the Associated Press wrote,
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 opine that "Hitchens has nothing new to say,
although it must be acknowledged that he says it exceptionally
well."[2][3]
God Is Not Great was not without its detractors. 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's book "provides a frequently
primitive and juvenile characterization of religious belief."[4] Dennis Prager,
meanwhile, claimed that Hitchens had misrepresented his argument
about "Bible class"
in favor of the Christian faith.[5]
Bobby Murphy criticised what he saw as a lack of argumentative
substance in Hitchens's use of so many examples of vicious acts,
stating that "the insufficiency of each example might be overlooked
by a reader bombarded, chapter after chapter, with a vast array of
vile atrocities; thus it seems that Hitchens's strategy is to
convince his readers by overwhelming their emotions."[6]
Responding to Hitchens's claim that "all attempts to reconcile
faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and
ridicule", Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution (with which
Hitchens has an official affiliation) quotes a paleontologist that
Hitchens himself commends — Stephen Jay Gould. After a survey
showed that half of all scientists were religious, Gould said,
"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."[7] 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."[8]
The religious 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."
[9]
Sales
history
The book was published on May 1, 2007, and within a week had
reached #2 on the Amazon.com bestsellers list[10]
(behind Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows), and reached #1 on the New York
Times Bestseller list in its third week.[11]
See also
References
Notes
External
links
| Criticism of religion |
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| Criticism of belief
systems |
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| Criticism of organizations |
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| Criticism of texts |
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| Criticism of religious
figures |
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