God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Review other pillars of unbelief if you like - Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Chester Dolan, S. T. Joshi, B.C. Johnson, Ruth Hurmence Green, and Steve Allen
I remember my father once telling me about a co-worker who said he would rather have someone call him a “fool” to his face and be this honest rather than continue to pretend differently. Such candor can be appreciated and it is within this candor that Hitchens writes God is not Great. He doesn’t pull any punches; this yellow book does not lead to addresses and phone numbers of your neighbors; instead, it leads to the dissolution of the trust in religion (or so he supposes).
Hitchens, early in his book, reveals a challenge given to him by Dennis Prager, one of America’s best known religious broadcasters, that goes something like this: If you were in a strange city one evening and saw a few men coming toward you, would you feel more or less safe knowing they just came from a prayer meeting? The answer an evangelist expects is an unqualified “yes,” but Hitchens answers this as if it was not hypothetical and turns the tables on Prager’s challenge: “Just to stay within the letter ‘B,’ I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance.” Hitchens has witnessed numerous religious atrocities and, where violence has not ruled the day, stupidity has. In Belfast whole streets were burned by sectarian warfare between different sects of Christianity and in northern Nigeria, Islamic figures issued a fatwa (ruling) declaring the polio vaccine to be a conspiracy by the United States (and also the United Nations) against Muslims. The beginning of this book is chocked full of examples showing this type of destructive religious behavior, almost overkill to make the point Hitchens wants to make here.
Yet, I live in a community where there are many Christian churches (none of any other faiths that I know of) and I would feel absolutely safe walking past a group of men coming out of a prayer meeting at any one of those churches. So what is the difference between Hitchens' experiences and mine?
Obviously Hitchens is ignoring the “moron” factor (I could use any other negative terminology here also) playing itself out in a lot of these instances and the tendency of some people to ignore evidence contrary to their beliefs while continually adopting a theology harmful to themselves and others. It seems as if Hitchens follows the same liberal political philosophy as Michael Moore: just as the presence of a gun causes gun crime and accidents (but not the mismanagement of it by the owner), so the presence of belief in god causes other violence (but not any defect in character by the believer). Obviously things are a lot more complicated than that. The mere presence of a gun or religion does not push one toward violence.
Indeed, I could follow the same chain of reasoning as Hitchens to prove that science is a bankrupt enterprise which causes us to follow hypotheses and facts that are horribly untrue while belief in evolution causes racism and hence we should abandon practice or belief in both, but Hitchens would naturally have nothing of that chain of reasoning. Frankly, neither would I simply because I recognize that people often believe dumb things because of either their unwillingness to follow rival theories, hard-hearted persistence in remaining in their own state of mind, or lack of facts. (Fellow atheist Michael Shermer would certainly agree.) So why not believe as much with the study of religion? The reason, I think, is that Hitchens is looking for ammunition to throw at religion as to disprove any and all religious tenets.
After exploring the bad effects of belief in religion, Hitchens next briefly delves into theological truth claims and reflects on the origins of religious belief.
