In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am
Not a Christian and Sam Harris's recent bestseller, The End of Faith,
Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case
against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and
reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry
of the double helix.
against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and
reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry
of the double helix.
Hitchens, one of our great political pugilists, delivers the best
of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. The same contrarian spirit
that makes him delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or
especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining
huckster prosecutor once he has God placed in the dock. And can he turn a
phrase!: "monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a
hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the
way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents." Hitchens's one-liners
bear the marks of considerable sparring practice with believers. Yet few
believers will recognize themselves as Hitchens associates all of them
for all time with the worst of history's theocratic and inquisitional
moments. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling
believers' weaker arguments: that faith offers comfort (false comfort is
none at all), or has provided a historical hedge against fascism (it
mostly hasn't), or that "Eastern" religions are better (nope). The
book's real strength is Hitchens's on-the-ground glimpses of religion's
worst face in various war zones and isolated despotic regimes. But its
weakness is its almost fanatical insistence that religion poisons
"everything," which tips over into barely disguised misanthropy. (May 30)
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