God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Abstract

GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING. Christopher Hitchens. 2007. Twelve: NY. Pp. 307. Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton (Evangel University/Springfield, MO). Hitchens begins his pungent polemic against religion by explaining how he came to question religious teaching as a child (chapter 1). Following an experience we might label deconversion, associated with a teacher's simplistic description of reality covered with a simple religious gloss, Hitchens reflects upon perceived oddities in scripture and child-abus ing clergy. Next, Hitchens adumbrates his thesis as: four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that is ultimately grounded on with-thinking. (p. 4) A recurrent motif is an appeal to Ockham's razor as a device to strip the unnecessary explanations of faith from a rational worldview. Hitchens covers the gamut of common objections to religious faith in the five chapters that follow the introduction. These deal with the violence and mayhem visited upon one religious group by another in the name of their particular faith (chapter 2). He inserts an odd essay on the religious denigration of pigs (chapter 3), attacks faith for a history of antihealth policies (chapter 4), and challenges metaphysical claims (chapter 5) along with arguments about intelligent design (chapter 6). A close reading of the antihealth policies of various faiths can be a useful challenge for those concerned with medical ethics, and concerns for psychological well-being, which are not addressed by the author. What seems to be the center point of his book is a trinity of chapters assailing the tenets of Judaism (chapter 7), Christianity (chapter 8), and Islam (chapter 9). Religious scholars know these arguments but the review serves to summarize (or perhaps, bowdlerize) the salient antireligious sentiments that might appeal to a middlebrow audience. Next, we encounter five essays (chapters 10-10) on related matters interrupted by an attack on the failures of Asian faiths (chapter 14). Among other things, Hitchens minimizes miracles, harrumphs on hell, and opines on the onerous doctrines of religion (primarily Christianity). Hitchens concludes with three chapters that offer the reader hope for a better worldview. He responds to anticipated attacks against secularism (chapter 17), supports The Resistance of the Rational (chapter 18), and concludes with a call for a New Enlightenment (chapter 19). The references are a bit too sparse to substantiate many of his attacks. It is evident that he has relied more on appeals to authority, persuasive rhetoric, and logical argument based on selective secular assumptions about reality to support his various positions, rather than address more substantive matters such as textual criticism, subtleties in hermeneutics, genuine disagreements about ethical matters, and nuanced positions articulated by contemporary theologians and scientists. …