God Is Not Great
Related
- Christopher Hitchens (2007)
Overview
Subtitled How Religion Poisons Everything, this is Hitchens' prosecution of organised religion as a whole. Rather than a philosophical case against God it is a historical and moral one: chapters on the health consequences of religious rules, on the Old and New Testaments as documents, on the Qur'an, on the invention of miracles, on the argument from design, and on the claim that totalitarian regimes were secular. Hitchens argues that religion is man-made, that its morality is borrowed and often worse than ours, and that a free mind has no need of it.
Notes
Less rigorous than The God Delusion and far better written. The argument is cumulative and rhetorical, which is the style I criticise in Religious Apologetics, and in fairness I should say so here; the difference is that Hitchens' individual charges mostly stick. The chapters on the textual history of the Bible and the Qur'an are a good introduction to why I do not treat the Historical Reliability of the New Testament as established. The title claim is overstated, and he knew it.