Christopher Hitchens pontificates in his book, “God Is Not Great,” that, organized 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.”
By means of a sentence steeped in odious absolutes, and obvious elitism, we are to conclude with certainty, one assumes, that billions of religious people worldwide exhibit these “well-defined” characteristics.
The most glaring thing about Hitchens’s book is the title itself. The title, “God Is Not Great” is taken from Saddam Hussein’s words: “Allahuh Akhbar” (“God Is Great”). Not only does the title subliminally liken all religion to Islamic fanaticism, but, predictably, Hitchens is all over the place within the context of the book, speaking of Christians at one point, and then of Hindus, and then, on to Muslims, painting all three belief systems with one broad brush.
The following paragraphs are excerpted from my December 10, 2008 post in the “Richard Dawkins Takes Another Life” thread of November 24, 2008 at this blog:
One of the most thorough reviews of “God Is Not Great,” was written by Stephen Prothero, chair of Boston University’s religion department and the author of: Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–and Doesn’t.” While Prothero’s review is scathing, interestingly, he also says of Hitchens: “…there is no living journalist I more enjoy reading.” A partial transcript of Prothero’s review now follows:
“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 naif. 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, or 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 Kool-Aid (a beverage Hitchens feels compelled to mention no fewer than three times).”
“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 who’s author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject. In the end, this maddenlingly dogmatic book does little more than illustrate one of Hitchens’s pet themes–the ability of dogma to put reason to sleep.”
Hitchens, and the other “acclaimed” New Atheist authors utilize a common ploy in classifying “religion” or “organized religion” as if it were an easily defined monolith.
Richard Dawkins is as smug, pompous and imperious as is Hitchens in saying: “I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they may have been or will be invented.
Daniel Dennett weighs in equally “authoritatively” with his “scholarly” insight into what religion is. He defines it as: “…social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.”
Sam Harris, perhaps the most irrational of the neo-sophist athiests, and the fourth “member” of the so called “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism (See their glib and sophist “conclave” of the same name at You Tube), proclaims in his book, “The End of Faith,” that, belief in God must be stamped out forceably: “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them.”
These are the guys over whom a large segment of the mainstream media swoon, and proclaim as “geniuses” on the subject of religious belief.
Do they really think that self-indulgence and a “do-your-own-thing” general philosophy is beneficial for future generations of Americans and citizens of the world?
I believe, rather, that the “philosophy” they espouse is, in large part, responsible for the recent finding by a Washington-based “think-tank” that, 75% of young Americans are unfit for military service.
What I know, viscerally, and what I can state with confidence, is that, atheism is an unnatural, learned mindset. I think the more valid question is, not how one comes to believe in God, but, rather how a person logically embraces atheism.
I see atheism, plainly, as a willful rejection of God. How many contentious books have been written about other phenomena in which one has no belief? Only God seems to evoke such ferocity.
So that readers of this thread are better able to discern my “arguments” in future commentary in defense of Christianity, and in opposition to the New Atheist “agenda” I felt it was important to compile a “thumbnail” sketch of the philosophy of these authors.




