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God Is Not Great

How Religion Poisons Everything

By Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens (Reader)

(96)

| Audio CD | 9781600245572

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Book Description

Now available as a value-priced edition! Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as "one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time "takes on his biggest subject yet--the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world.
With his unique brand of erudiContinue

Now available as a value-priced edition! Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as "one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time "takes on his biggest subject yet--the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world.
With his unique brand of erudition and wit, Hitchens describes the ways in which religion is man-made. "God did not make us," he says. "We made God." He explains the ways in which religion is immoral: We damage our children by indoctrinating them. It is a cause of sexual repression, violence, and ignorance. It is a distortion of our origins and the cosmos. In the place of religion, Hitchens offers the promise of a new enlightenment through science and reason, a realm in which hope and wonder can be found through a strand of DNA or a gaze through the Hubble Telescope. As Hitchens sees it, you needn't get the blues once you discover the heavens are empty.

Critics

  • In the name of the Father

    God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion by Christopher Hitchens 307pp, Atlantic Books, £16.99 First Dennett, then Dawkins and now Hitchens: and of these three recent diatribes against religion, Christopher Hitchens's is the fiercest. For him reli ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • The gospel according to Hitch

    God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion by Christopher Hitchens Atlantic Books £17.99, pp320 For such a rabid God-hater, Christopher Hitchens has a very pious background. If not a binge-worshipper, he was a serial congregant, grazing on a buffet ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

11 Reviews

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  • 2 people find this helpful

    Hitchens has no fear in bluntly defending the view of the non-believer in the face of religious fanatics. His points are clear and draw on historical fact. I have a lot of respect for this guy.

    Near the end of the book he provides great insight into brave free thinkers such as Lucretius, Thomas J ... (continue)

    Hitchens has no fear in bluntly defending the view of the non-believer in the face of religious fanatics. His points are clear and draw on historical fact. I have a lot of respect for this guy.

    Near the end of the book he provides great insight into brave free thinkers such as Lucretius, Thomas Jefferson, David Hume, and Charles Darwin. He also clears the record as throughout history, religious figures have tried to distort what non-believers have said or fabricate outright lies about their opinions in order to make them appear as supporters of religion. The most prominent figure of all in this respect would be Albert Einstein. His quotes have been repeatedly misinterpreted and at least one quote attributed to Einstein was never even uttered by him. However, that lie survived for half a century and continues to propagate today as strongly as ever through religious apologists on Internet messageboards. Here is Einstein's own repsonse to this quote being attributed to him:

    "It was of course a lie what you read about my religious convictions; a lie which has been systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and have never denied this, but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." - Albert Einstein

    Here is a quote by Einstein in which he expresses his conviction that ethics is strictly a human concern; a sentiment echoed in Sam Harris' view of ethics being the field concerned with human happiness.

    "I do not believe in the immortality of the individual and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern, with no superhuman authority behind it." - Albert Einstein

    Hitchens advocates unfettered free dicussion and inquiry. How could anyone hope to taint that ideal in order to shoot it down for their own selfish purposes?

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    audioreader said on Nov 28, 2008 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

  • 2 people find this helpful

    Hitchens, Christopher (2007). god is not Great: how religion poisons everything. New York: Twelve. 2007.

    La minuscola nel titolo non è un errore: è un’espressione chiara e programmatica del punto di vista di Hitchens. Forse l’altro locus del libro in cui Hitchens chiarisce al meglio la sua pos ... (continue)

    Hitchens, Christopher (2007). god is not Great: how religion poisons everything. New York: Twelve. 2007.

    La minuscola nel titolo non è un errore: è un’espressione chiara e programmatica del punto di vista di Hitchens. Forse l’altro locus del libro in cui Hitchens chiarisce al meglio la sua posizione (nel senso tanto di stance quanto di posture) è negli Acknowledgments finali:

    My old schoolfriend Michael Prest was the first person to make it plain to me that while the authorities could compel us to attend prayers, they could not force us to pray. I shall always remember his upright position while others hypocritically knelt or inclined themselves, and also the day that I decided to join him. All postures of submission and surrender should be part of our prehistory (p. 285).

    Hitchens è un polemista lucido ed espressivo. Scrive in un modo molto efficace, ed è un piacere leggerlo sia nei ragionamenti argomentati e documentati, sia nelle invettive e nelle memorabili battute finali. Molte delle cose che racconta, soprattutto con riferimento alle malefatte del Cattolicesimo e più in generale del Cristianesimo, le conosciamo bene. Ma lo strutturato elenco che Hitchens ci propone lascia abbastanza impressionati comunque. Più interessante per noi è la parte in cui ci chiarisce che le cosiddette religioni orientali non sono poi migliori di quelle “del libro”.

    Hitchens, come già Dawkins (per The God Delusion) e Dennett (per Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), non è recensito favorevolmente. Come tutti questi autori hanno opportunamente sottolineato, non si può polemizzare sulla religione come su qualunque altra cosa. Il tabù opera ancora e alla religione e ai religiosi è dovuto, apparentemente, un rispetto che non è dovuto (che ne so) ai vegetariani o ai comunisti. E a chi non mostra questo rispetto – sta, appunto, in piedi senza genuflessioni – si attribuisce la colpa di essere faziosi e comunque esagerati. Tra l’altro, Hitchens ne ha per tutti, anche per le religioni ideologiche dei totalitarismi del XX secolo, e quindi si non fa troppi amici. Ma il libro merita di essere letto, anche da chi è credente o da quella maggioranza silenziosa (?!) che, pur senza credere, sostiene che le religioni “fanno del bene” o sono buoni “compagni di viaggio” verso la progressiva meta che volta per volta si propone.

    Il mio pezzo preferito è il commento al Vangelo di Giuda, pubblicato da National Geographic nella primavera del 2006:

    The book is chiefly spiritualistic drivel, as one might expect, but it offers a version of “events” that is fractionally more credible than the official account. For one thing, it maintains as do its partner texts that the supposed god of the “Old” Testament is the one to be avoided, a ghastly emanation from sick minds. (This makes it easy to see why it was so firmly banned and denounced: orthodox Christianity is nothing if it is not a vindication and completion of that evil story.) Judas attends the final Passover meal, as usual, but departs from the customary script. When Jesus appears to pity his other disciples for knowing so little about what is at stake, his rogue follower boldly says that he believes he knows what the difficulty is. “I know who you are and where you have come from,” he tells the leader. “You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo.” This “Barbelo” is not a god but a heavenly destination, a motherland beyond the stars. Jesus comes from this celestial realm, but is not the son of any Mosaic god. Instead, he is an avatar of Seth, the third and little-known son of Adam. He is the one who will show the Sethians the way home. Recognizing that Judas is at least a minor adept of this cult, Jesus takes him to one side and awards him the special mission of helping him shed his fleshly form and thus return heavenward. He also promises to show him the stars that will enable Judas to follow him.
    Deranged science fiction though this is, it makes infinitely more sense than the everlasting curse placed on Judas for doing what somebody had to do, in this otherwise pedantically arranged chronicle of a death foretold. It also makes infinitely more sense than blaming the Jews for all eternity. For a long time, there was incandescent debate over which of the “Gospels” should be regarded as divinely inspired. Some argued for these and some for others, and many a life was horribly lost on the proposition. Nobody dared say that they were all man-inscribed long after the supposed drama was over, and the “Revelation” of Saint John seems to have squeezed into the canon because of its author’s (rather ordinary) name. But as Jorge Luis Borges put it, had the Alexandrian Gnostics won the day, some later Dante would have drawn us a hypnotically beautiful word-picture of the wonders of “Barbelo”. This concept I might choose to call “the Borges shale”: the verve and imagination needed to visualize a cross section of evolutionary branches and bushes, with the extraordinary but real possibilitiy that a different stem or line (or tune or poem) had predominated in the labyrinth. Great ceilings and steeples and hymns, he might have added, would have consecrated it, and skilled torturers would have worked for days on those who doubted the truth of Barbelo. beginning with the fingernails and working their way ingeniously toward the testicles, the vagina, the eyes, and the viscera. Nonbelief in Barbelo would, correspondingly, have been an unfalling sign that one had no morals at all (pp. 113-114).

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    Boris Limpopo said on Oct 16, 2007 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

  • Thoroughly investigated book

    I was pleasantly surprised by this book and by the depth of Hitchens' research. Very well written and well structured, it spans through centuries of events, facts and tales without losing the point.
    This book really shook me and made me rethink my own approach towards religions in general.

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    fabiodebe said on Sep 3, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • Religion poisons everything. This is the incipit of the book and what H. wants to demonstrate in a sort of factual report bringing several historical and factual examples.
    Even if I also am a non-believer and I agree on the truth of what he says I think that even if the book is constructed like an ... (continue)

    Religion poisons everything. This is the incipit of the book and what H. wants to demonstrate in a sort of factual report bringing several historical and factual examples.
    Even if I also am a non-believer and I agree on the truth of what he says I think that even if the book is constructed like an academic essay is full of bias somehow.
    Listing all the negative aspects of all religions and underlying only these aspects is somehow like watching just one face of the moon.
    I think that in this way this book lacks of tolerance, and thus of respect towards believers who are really good people.
    It should have been emphasized that unfortunately religions are misused by the craziest ones (he himself use as an example North Korean‘s dictatorship as a similitude) and for economic and political purposes. But at the end it is just a list of well documented negative facts
    I agree with the conclusion that “we need a new enlightenment..”, but certainly you cannot have hope if you are so negative.
    PS. The audio book is read by the author who is not a professional reader indeed. It was really a painful experience as he read too fast with a bad intonation for such a subject, and so I had to listen several times each chapter.

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    Barbara ABP said on Jun 8, 2011 | Add your feedback

  • God is not Great

    What I really liked of Hitchens's criticism to religions is the fact that everything he writes is based on his (what seems to be) extensive knowledge of history, philosophy, religions, and different cultures. What I didn't really like was the his writing style. He certainly is a very good writer, bu ... (continue)

    What I really liked of Hitchens's criticism to religions is the fact that everything he writes is based on his (what seems to be) extensive knowledge of history, philosophy, religions, and different cultures. What I didn't really like was the his writing style. He certainly is a very good writer, but sometimes just too much sophisticated...I found it often difficult to relate specific facts with the point he was trying to make. Also chapter titles seemed to me in many instances just arbitrary...I couldn't really find a match with the actual contents of the chapter.

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    Cati said on May 13, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • "God Is Not Great" is a critic to the different systems that try to explain the entity of "God" as an almighty self. It poses the same dichotomy of all times: either Almighty God doesn't exist or if He exists, he is not almighty. I liked it because it is clear and doesn't try to convince you of anyt ... (continue)

    "God Is Not Great" is a critic to the different systems that try to explain the entity of "God" as an almighty self. It poses the same dichotomy of all times: either Almighty God doesn't exist or if He exists, he is not almighty. I liked it because it is clear and doesn't try to convince you of anything. It just poses the question, the arguments, the examples, and leaves the question open for us to decide.

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    ariadna73 said on Jun 15, 2010 | Add your feedback

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