Christopher Hitchens’ book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything appears on the New York Bestseller list as No. 7 (you can read the first chapter on that site if you are so inclined). I picked up a copy at a recent browsing trip to Borders and read a chapter and several sections—enough to know I didn’t want to waste my money on it. How these kinds of books come to be “best sellers†is a mystery to me.
Jacques Berlinerblau provides what I think is a responsible critical review of the book in the June 1, 2007 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Secularism in the Elimination Roundâ€). It’s worth the read.
He starts his review with:
Christopher Hitchens closes his subtly titled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything with the following directive: “It has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.” The enemy in question would be religion. All religion, all manifestations of religion — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and all their sundry denominations, too. It’s all bad! And unless Hitchens’s grand strategy is to taunt religion so mercilessly that it packs its bags and storms, red faced, out of the cosmos, his book provides little of use for the coming struggle.
God-bashing seems more popular than ever, of course. And as a consequence, the responsible and reasoned civil religious voices are discounted (if not silenced) in the public square. For a typical polemic see Sam Harris’ piece in the L.A. Times. He ends his rant with this nugget:
Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.
