 | | |
| God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything | 
 enlarge | Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Twelve Books, Hachette Book Group
Category: Book
List Price: $24.99
Buy New: $7.99
You Save: $17.00 (68%)
Buy New/Used/Collectible from $7.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  (806 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1383
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 307
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0446579807
Dewey Decimal Number: 200
EAN: 9780446579803
ASIN: 0446579807
Publication Date: May 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
 logical, but superficial to some extent November 10, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I read "God is not great" relatively quickly, despite many thoughts rushing throung my head while I was reading. I am happy I read this book, which is one of many recently published in the never-ending polemics between believers and atheists. I feel that it is hard to review a book so popular, and I am aware that my review will probably drown in the sea of others, but I could not resist the temptation to share a few thoughts.
Christopher Hitchens tries to take an angle different from Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and reviews the whole spectrum of atheist arguments, with a personal flavor, perhaps attempting to win a broader, more general audience. He did not need to win me, because I am a skeptical scientist, but I was curious what his arguments would be.
The book consists of 19 chapters with provocative titles like "Religion kills" or "Religion as an original sin". These are misleading, as is the title of the whole book. Hitchens makes an argument, that much is true, but it is not an argument against God or faith per se - it is an argument against organized, institutionalized religion. If we do not remember it, the meaning of the whole book can be lost. Hitchens himself admits it, somewhat nonchalantly, here and there, for example at the end of chapter six, "Arguments from Design" (which, in itself, is not the best, and serves only and a reference for those interested in biology and evolution): "...we no longer have any need of a god to explain what is no longer mysterious. What believers will do, now that their faith is optional and private and irrelevant, is a matter for them. We should not care, as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any for of coercion." The people in the hierarchies of various religious organizations, not faith, turn out to be the whole problem, and here Hitchens makes his case very well.
I was a little disappointed by the initial chapter, which I found very superficial and not very original - up to (and including) chapter six (although there was some anecdotal info, which was interesting or new to me - like the answer to the question "if you were in a strange city at night, and you saw a group of men approaching you, would you feel safer knowing that they had just come out of a place of religious worship". The middle chapters I found best, and towards the end I was a bit bored - I am not sure if this was the intention of the author...
I appreciated very much many references to specific works of philosophers, as well as the literary associations and the reference list at the end of the book. For those wishing to explore the subject it is an excellent source. Hitchens relies very much on his area of expertise, having done a lot of work and written books on Thomas Paine and Mother Theresa, and these fragments of the book felt for me the best and the strongest. The biological arguments were not the most impressive part (better left to Dawkins). Some of the language can be perceived as offensive by the religious people, too. I liked the logic and the comparisons of religious organizations to the infamy of Nazism and Communism (sad but true).
All in all, I think it is a book, which can be a useful voice in a discussion for beginners making first steps in the world of the battles between the religious and the non-believers, and trying to figure out what is good for them.
 Not Again..... November 9, 2008
2 out of 15 found this review helpful
Just another book by an angry Atheist that needs to beat up those (verbally) who belive in God or have religion. I would say the same for a Believer who would write a book railing Atheists. People's religious believes are none of Hitchen's business and instead of writing books, should just read them. Everyone takes cheap shots at those, especially Christianity. I would like to see Hitchens have a conference on his book in Saudi Arabia, perhaps he would appreciate the free press (in Christian nations) that give him rights to spread his gospel of hate.
 Amusing but Shrill November 5, 2008
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
The first thing to remember about Christopher Hitchens is that he is a journalist by trade, versus a scholar capable of writing a well researched paper that could withstand extensive critical peer review. Just a quick flip to the back of "God is Not Great" proves my point: there is no bibliography, and the "reference" section, all six pages of it, consists mostly of sloppy and essentially lame notes citing sources that, quite frankly, are almost counterproductive to his arguments.
So what you have here is more of an extended essay: Hitchens' view of the world vis-a-vis religion, which he apparently just had to get off his chest.
There is no doubt that Hitchens IS one heck of a writer, and he has a devastating pen. I would not want to be the target of one of his polemics. Which is what this is. Even though I agree with most of what he says, I can see that ultimately, this is just Christopher Hitchens venting a lifetime's worth of bile toward injustices he sees in the world that he is certain have been caused by religion. I don't disagree with him that in many cases, religion seems, in fact, to be guilty as charged.
What Hitchens fails to address at all however is the debate over whether it is religion that is causing all this evil, or whether bad things happen simply because Man is quite simply a very nasty creature. Believers who like to rebut the former argument by arguing "more people have died under atheist regimes like Stalin or Mao than because of religion" are actually and inadvertently supporting the latter argument. I would suggest that all this mayhem occurs simply because some people are simply no good, and when they get into positions of power they are prone to killing people by the dozens, or perhaps millions. Whether they use their religion, or their fanatic belief in Marxism, or something else as justification doesn't change the fact that their primary rationale has something to do with either greed, lust for power, or just plain nastiness.
Conversely, Hitchens does not account for any of the good that religion accomplishes in the world. And it does, in fact, accomplish much good. I cite as Exhibit A my grand-uncle, who died while I was still very young, and so I do not remember the one time I met him. But I know all about him. He was the village priest in a small farming community in Nova Scotia, and he gave of himself ceaselessly for over 50 years caring for and overseeing the needs of all the people in that community. If someone was sick, he got medical help or tended to the person himself, and used church funds to pay the medical bills if the person had nothing. If someone was hungry, he made sure they were fed. When anyone needed a hand, or support, or a friend, he was there. Would he have still been a decent, caring, charitable person if he had not become a priest? Probably. But would he have accomplished all the good that he did had he not become a man of the cloth? Probably not. So I cannot accept Hitchens argument that "religion poisons everything." It may poison a lot. But everything? No.
If we ran a balance sheet on whether religion does more harm than good, I'm not sure what the answer to that question would be. It might come out pretty even. Or not. I don't disagree that religion causes a lot of harm in the world. We might be better off without it, though eradicating it, when it seems that the need for it is literally hard-wired into most of us genetically, is almost certainly a fool's errand. Still, the kind of black and white thinking that Hitchens exhibits here is ultimately not useful. I would like to see a more balanced analysis of the pros and cons of religion. This book is not it.
In summary, if you are an unbeliever, you may find yourself agreeing with most of Hitchens' criticisms, and you may find yourself laughing out loud. But in the end, this book is too shrill, too negative, too unbalanced, and too unsympathetic to ever do anything more than preach unto the choir of agnostics and atheists, a relatively small percentage of the population. These are not the people who need to be reminded that religion run amok can become a thing of evil. This book will turn off the folks who actually need to hear the message that this book purports to bring long before it ever has a chance to penetrate their thought processes.
 What now? October 23, 2008
1 out of 8 found this review helpful
So where do we go from here, now that the great English/American intellectual,talk show guest Christopher Hitchens has informed all of mankind that there is no God, that this internal instinct we all have may just be wish-thinking and our need to worship is probably just fear of the dark. And of dying.
Hitchens does do an impressive job of discrediting the holy men and holy books that somehow came to pass before the invention of the video camera and the printing press. The heretofor sacred scriptures are probably just cobbled together collections of folklore, myths, early philosophy and incredible superstition that seemed believable to illiterate peasants in anchient times. But modern man has easy access to all the information ever recorded in the world thru his laptop computer. Are we still to be devoted to such nonsense that was churned up when civilization was in its infancy?
Where I tend to disagree with Hitchens is that even without religion, man will still behave ethically. No he won't. If there is no God, no heaven or hell fire, no certain punishment or eternal reward to choose from, then the riff raft of this world runs amok and society is ungovernable.
The problem is not religion. The problem is the sinister manipulators who inevitably come along to mobilize the gullible, the uneducated, the poor and to use them for political and military gain.
Also, much of this book is wordy and scholarly and whoever did his fact-checking, God bless him.
Reason and Free-Thought Can Prevail Over Dictums October 21, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I found "God Is Not Great" to be scholarly and informative about the way religions have been constructed, and in general I had to push myself through the first three or four chapters to capture the meat of Hitchens' message.
Why? Because one can only hear the obvious that "religions poison" so many times before the message is over-sold. The descriptions about C.S. Lewis' writings, the formation of religions that I call "tribes" in my book, are interesting.
There is something impressively missing in Hitchens' book and in Dawkins as well: Why do people cling to tribes?; Are there ethical tribes that return real value to the individual?; By what measures or metrics can these be evaluated?; and, What if "the metaphysical" is really a seamless extension of "the physical", wherein "the metaphysical" is only the branch of science not explored?
Atheists who are committed to a "belief" that all of the self ends at death, and believers in deities or saviors, have something in common: Their "beliefs" limit their freedom of mind to explore with reason and experience with epistemology.
Locking out any possibility but "termination-of-being" at death is a blind belief - essentially a "religious-like" limitation.
Humanists, for example, who embrace the philosophy of open minds, the freedom to consider all possibilities guided through reason, to explore and make actionable and ethical decisions in one's volitional self-interest, will find support in a new book: Atheists Can Get To "Heaven": Perspectives From The Journey Beyond The Tunnel of Light.
The book may be the first to describe the continuum between the physical and the post-physical, perhaps the first major new concept about the meaning of human life and evolution since Darwin. "A second Copernican Revolution", said one Editor.
The book describes an extraordinary journey that reveals revolutionary discoveries transcending across the physical into the metaphysical. By replacing mythology and faith with reason, the book deeply opens the meaning and vision of enlightened spirituality for humanity based in reason, as a sequence of evolution. This compelling story connects you to a timeless philosophy, revealing a thought-provoking and perhaps controversial new version of humanity's evolving future. The book vividly transports you beyond "the tunnel of light" during a clinical death experience to explore the vastness of our evolutionary future, describing the true nature of "heaven."
Featuring astute perspectives gained from this journey, readers are encouraged to open their mind to possibilities that may transcend current beliefs by gathering answers and meaning supported with observations that can be applied to every day life. This book is a powerful source of hope and inspiration to evolve personal growth with reason and volition, to impressive awareness and attainment.
For a comprehensive description please visit:
www.atheistscangettoheaven.com
then click on the link to Amazon and read the posted "reviews".
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| | |