god is not Great: Christopher Hitchens

"We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking alters and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection ... it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it."
--Christopher Hitchens

Ever since mankind first gained an awareness of ourselves and our surroundings we have attempted to explain the unexplainable and give name to the phenomena that we don't understand. As we crawled from our caves and began to form villages and later towns and cities belief systems began to codify into rigid dogma. Ten thousand years of human development has filtered down into three major world religions that fight amongst themselves though they all share the same basic roots while various other sects quibble in the background, spouting certain beliefs loudly and publicly while keeping violent and often bloody thoughts hidden from the unbeliever. In god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens lays bare the roots and decayed growth of religion on the altar of atheism with his usual ascerbic wit. For anyone familiar with Hitchen's writing you should well be aware that no one and nothing is safe in this book.

Religion has always been a volatile subject and like politics, something you should never discuss in mixed company. For Christopher Hitchens this philosophy has never held any water, especially in a time when the three major religions battle each other for supremacy and control, exerting influence in lands controlled by others and creating untold havoc and chaos in the lives of people who just want to exist. Hitchens outlines his visits to war torn areas where he has come face to face with what the power of god can do. He takes no prisoners and spares no feelings as he proceeds through miracles, saints, holy writ, circumcision (male and female), and birth control. He covers the major religions from their earliest roots in the desert and seems convinced that Jesus, if he existed, was nothing more than a wandering psychotic. He also proceeds to take apart the Bible (Old and New Testaments) and the Koran in swift order, including one incredibly humorous chapter all about "Why Heaven Hates Pork". And for those of you who follow Eastern traditions and so think that you're safe from the onslaught, think again. There's more to those religions then meets the eye, including the little talked about Hindu suicide bombers and militant Buddhist death squads in Sri Lanka.

He sees little to support the idea that a nation founded on the belief in a deity can thereby call itself "good". In most cases it seems to be much the opposite. As Hitchens maintains, most, if not all, nations built as theocracies quickly fall into a hard and unyielding rule that doesn't allow for change or growth of any kind and only leads to bloody revolt in the end. Unfortunately however, secularism doesn't always work out either, as in the case of Nazi Germany, or Stalin's Russia. For Hitchens then, the only option is the hold out for "renewed enlightenment" against the religions that are still at work in the world. Otherwise we might all fall in the wake of their insanity.

As I stated at the beginning of this review, Christopher Hitchens is not for the faint of heart. He blatantly states his feelings that religion is child abuse and he has received death threats from Muslims for his support of Denmark in the wake of the Mohammed cartoons. He has no fear of anyone and so tells his true feelings without softening it. I've read varying other reviews of this book and so far many are not good, declaiming that Hitchens is writing about "other Christians, not me", or that he has his facts wrong but unfortunately, he is correct a good percentage of the time. For myself, I enjoyed this book. I'm a student of history and already familiar with many of the facts but I'm also a fan of Hitchens and his writing style so I enjoyed reading his take on the situation.

If you're secure in yourself and beliefs then a book like this won't do anything more then make you think a little more then you already do.
--------------------------------
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Twelve (May 1, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0446579807
ISBN-13: 978-0446579803
Buy this Book