Chistopher Hitchens' GOD IS NOT GREAT and some other book recommendations

Just a couple days ago I posted a review of RICHARD DAWKINS' brilliant "THE GOD DELUSION" and I'd like to review another atheist book by Christopher Hitchens, one of the great political shit-disturbers of our time. Another book I'm looking forward to reading by him is THE PORTABLE ATHEIST: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever.

This is a very different book than Dawkins'. but this book along with Dawkins' are 2 of the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. Dawkins' is much more scientific, Christopher Hitchens seems to write with more of a youthful rhetoric spirit that makes reading his book very entertaining indeed, especially once he's got God in the ring. "monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents."

The main focus of Hitchens' book (and its' real strength) is the grim and bloody pictures he paints of religion's worst face in war and isolated despotic regimes. Hitchens is totally unapologetic about slamming religion. He once described Mother Teresa as "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud." Hitchens writes, religion 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." Hitchens argues that religion is "man-made" and murderous, originating in fear, forced and sustained by brutality.

Hitchens is unforgiving. This is scathing stuff and I think many people might be put off by the overall tone of the book. Just as an example, he slams world-respected Dalai Lama, St. Francis and Gandhi into the ground without an ounce of apology. Hitchens is right that you can be moral without being religious. He is right to trace contemporary sexism and sexual repression to ancient religious beliefs. And his attack on "intelligent design" is not only convincing but very funny. He describes the religious mind as "literal and limited" and the atheistic mind as "ironic and inquiring." I wholeheartedly agree.

My only real complaint about the book is that it often takes a Michael Moore-like approach to the subject, highlighting the evils of religion while not conceding any positive aspects. But given the fact that religious people tend to pigeonhole atheists at best as "lost souls" and "Satan-worshippers", a little counter-aggression and hatred is OK with me.

It's clear Hitchens KNOWS his topic. He was brought up in the Church of England, married into Greek Orthodoxy, was a former Marxist turned conservative who has acted as 'devil's advocate' in the Vatican's beatification of Mother Theresa, and has reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Moslem insurgencies around the world. He is clearly disgusted for what religious belief makes people do.

He has read the Bible, the Torah, the Book of Mormon and the Koran, and finds no evidence that they contain the words of any being other than fallible, parochial and non-contemporary humans, writing well after the events they claim to describe. He is particularly scathing about the Book of Mormon, dictated by Joseph Smith to a scribe behind a curtain who was not permitted to see the golden tablets delivered to Smith personally by the angel Moroni, and given back to the angel without anyone else seeing them. Just to state this is to reveal its absurdity, and yet we have a presidential candidate who avows it.

This is a well-argued, well-researched book that is pretty easy and fun to read. This is one of those books that you wish you could get your religious friends to read. However, most religious people don't even read their own Bibles anymore, let alone anything that challenges their faith. This belongs on EVERY bookshelf.

Here are some other recommended readings:

1. THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES - Charles Darwin (This should need no introduction...)
2. Another 2 books I've heard much about, but I haven't read yet is Sam Harris' "THE END OF FAITH" and "LETTERS TO A CHRISTIAN NATION".
3. Nietzsche "THE ANTICHRIST" and "BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL",etc. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19322
4. Bertrand Russell "WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, AND OTHER ESSAYS" http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russ...
5. "The Atheist Debater's Handbook"
6. "The Demon Haunted World" Carl Sagan
7. "GOD: THE FAILED HYPOTHESIS" (Prometheus Books, 2007) by Victor Stenger. A physicist and astronomer considers and demolishes a number of the cosmological arguments for the existence of a supernatural creator, including the recently-in-vogue arguments (the Anthropic Principle or the "fine-tuned universe") that [allegedly] against very high odds to the contrary, various physical laws and constants have values and relationships that make intelligent life possible, and therefore that something must have designed and created this universe as it is.
8. "DARWINS'S DANGEROUS IDEA" by Daniel C. Dennett (Touchstone / Simon & Schuster 1995). A terrific book that patiently explains, in detail, many of the implications of Darwin's theory of descent with modification / natural selection as it has been tested, re-tested, and refined over the past 148 years.
9. Stephen Hawking's "A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME" and the more recent more accessible revision of the above book "A BRIEFER HISTORY OF TIME"