Book Review: Christopher Hitchens "God is not Great"
Hey Folks -
Having just finished Christopher Hitchens’ book God Is Not Great, I am struck by two obvious but contradictory conclusions.
1. No sane person confronted with the facts can remain religious; and
2. No sane person would conclude that the presentation of facts to the faithful would have any serious effect.
Hitchens goes beyond Richard Dawkins' concentration on intellectual debate of philosophical and scientific positions, dissecting historical and sociological examples of the lunacy, self-serving, humanity-degrading behavior of the world’s religions. As I suggested, no one can read this book and sanely recommend a religious life or even a religious perspective. The field is left entirely to only madmen and con-men.
Of course, even if everyone were to read the book, its major effect would ironically be to organize millions, perhaps billions against it. While the book clearly reveals the hideous reality of religion’s history, in doing so it simultaneously reveals why the clear, intellectual, rational reality will be ignored, denied, demonized, or obliterated. The same despicable forces that should be rejected for manipulating our weakness to maintain their own selfish advantage will be enlisted to keep us from even considering rejection.
Hitchens writes, “Sigmund Freud was quite correct to describe the religious impulse in his The Future of an Illusion as essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish-thinking.” That’s it in a nutshell, I believe.
“Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die” speaks to the first problem. “Slam dunk,” “cake walk,” “Iraqi oil will pay for the war,” speak to the second. Hitchens’ hope, his “remedy,” is the arrival of a “new enlightenment,” but like “belling the cat,” a “new enlightenment” sounds a bit like “wish-thinking” to me.
So, I’m left where I started - better informed and educated as to the nature of humanity and society, but no closer to any optimism regarding a brighter, more rational, or saner world. Writing, reading, explaining, discussing, arguing, demonstrating, philosophizing won’t do it. It won’t do it for religion, and it won’t do it for anything else.
Something, perhaps, could make a better world; but if it ever does, it won’t be because people, presented with the rational facts from the real world rejected ignorant, self-defeating things they already believed.
- Uke Man
Having just finished Christopher Hitchens’ book God Is Not Great, I am struck by two obvious but contradictory conclusions.
1. No sane person confronted with the facts can remain religious; and
2. No sane person would conclude that the presentation of facts to the faithful would have any serious effect.
Hitchens goes beyond Richard Dawkins' concentration on intellectual debate of philosophical and scientific positions, dissecting historical and sociological examples of the lunacy, self-serving, humanity-degrading behavior of the world’s religions. As I suggested, no one can read this book and sanely recommend a religious life or even a religious perspective. The field is left entirely to only madmen and con-men.
Of course, even if everyone were to read the book, its major effect would ironically be to organize millions, perhaps billions against it. While the book clearly reveals the hideous reality of religion’s history, in doing so it simultaneously reveals why the clear, intellectual, rational reality will be ignored, denied, demonized, or obliterated. The same despicable forces that should be rejected for manipulating our weakness to maintain their own selfish advantage will be enlisted to keep us from even considering rejection.
Hitchens writes, “Sigmund Freud was quite correct to describe the religious impulse in his The Future of an Illusion as essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish-thinking.” That’s it in a nutshell, I believe.
“Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die” speaks to the first problem. “Slam dunk,” “cake walk,” “Iraqi oil will pay for the war,” speak to the second. Hitchens’ hope, his “remedy,” is the arrival of a “new enlightenment,” but like “belling the cat,” a “new enlightenment” sounds a bit like “wish-thinking” to me.
So, I’m left where I started - better informed and educated as to the nature of humanity and society, but no closer to any optimism regarding a brighter, more rational, or saner world. Writing, reading, explaining, discussing, arguing, demonstrating, philosophizing won’t do it. It won’t do it for religion, and it won’t do it for anything else.
Something, perhaps, could make a better world; but if it ever does, it won’t be because people, presented with the rational facts from the real world rejected ignorant, self-defeating things they already believed.
- Uke Man
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