Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Book Review: God is Not Great

Yeah, yeah. I know God is Not Great (Christoper Hitchens) wasn't the next book on my reading list but I found an audiobook of it cheap and it's a lot easier to listen to something walking to campus and back than it is to read (unless I want to wander into oncoming traffic).

So listening to an audiobook was new to me. It's a very different experience and I'm not all together sure how much it affects the perception of I have of the book, so I'll pretend it didn't in any large way.

Anyway, contrary to what you'll probably expect, I ended up finding God is Not Great to be a pretty worthless book. Perhaps it was the experience of listening to an audiobook, but I didn't find a single passage that was noteworthy enough to quote (which if you've paid attention to my other reviews is a startling exception).

The book started off well enough. It introduced the danger religion poses: Encouraging people to do downright stupid things due to a lack of critical thought under the guise of "faith". And worse, the disasters it causes are supposed to be tolerated. The best example given was a Jew performing circumcisions followed the instructions given in the Torah which calls for the foreskin to be bitten off. In the process of doing this, the practitioner passed along herpes to the children he was circumcising. One died and another suffered brain damage. Was this in a backwater village? No. Modern day New York. And instead of protesting this act, the mayor called for it to be respected. Another of the early chapters looked at how some religious beliefs are just plain stupid. Namely, this chapter focused on the demonization of the pig of some religions.

Salman Rushdie's plight was another major point that Hitchens made that was particularly good. Rushdie, whose fiction novel, The Satanic Verses sparked outrage in the Muslim community has had death threats and even attempted assassinations leveled at him due to a fatwa issued. As with the herpes transmission before, instead of condemning this, many instead blamed the victim thinking the order to murder over a work of fiction as something that was somehow inherently worthy of respect because it was religious.

The argument against the nonsense that religion makes people behave better was addressed very well, showing that many of the figureheads of the better behaving religious weren't really all that great. For example, Ghandi may have been kindly, but tried to (and in some manners succeeded to) drag a country down into a new dark age after secular powers had worked to gain independence.

In anticipation of the reverse of that argument, Hitchens attempts to address the other side of that coin: Atheism makes bad people (a particular favorite of the trolls here), pointing the finger squarely at Stalin, Pot Pol and Lenin. Hitchens' response was not at all convincing. The short version is that those that are often pointed to have little to do with what we typically consider atheists, meaning people who stick to a material philosophy and rule out the supernatural. Rather, they built themselves and their empires into their own gods, supplanting religious ideas with nonsense like Lysenkoism. As such, they had more in common with the religious counterparts than typical atheists. What Hitchens manages to miss however, is the more fundamental point: None of them every claimed to undertake their programs because of their atheism. Thus, trying to point to that as a cause is as rational as pointing to the fact that they were all white men. The same can not be said for their religious counterparts. So it seemed to me that Hitchens fumbled a strong argument there.

But aside from these few highlight, the book took a serious turn for the worse. The supporting arguments tended more towards personal testimonies which were rather ineffective and not suited for the grand generalizations Hitchens often drew from them. The main argument of chapters often became hopelessly lost in the rambling narratives Hitchens digressed into. The argument that the "miracles" espoused by religion is the equivalent of parlor tricks when compared to that which science has brought forth was cute, but not especially convincing.

Overall, out of 19 chapters, only five or six were particularly interesting and even then, only in parts. After "reading" this book, it seems strange that theists should get so upset about it given that it's not even that good.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hitchens in an anti semitic drunk. On about page 129 he talks about how he wishes the Jews had been wiped out in the battles commerorated the "Hannukkah". He said, "We could have been spared the whole things."

With that, I took the book back and got a refund.

But I should have realized where he was coming from long before that page when he praised "the ethcial glories of Marxism."

Worst thing about Hitchens is that he is an unapologetic supported of Bushes war. He loves anything that kills Muslims.

Eric

Anonymous said...

By the way, I disagree that none of the dictators ever committed atrocities because of his atheism.

trotsky constantly railed against religion Because of his atheistic beliefs.

www.trotsky.net

In his testament he reaffirms that he was a committed atheist and it guided his actions.

I think to deny that his atheism was a reason for his actions is simply avoiding the fact. We need to face up to it.

Eric

TheBrummell said...

Thanks for the review. Most of the other reviews I've met of Hitchens' book have been along the lines of "Hitchens sucks and I know he's a bad man so I didn't bother to read his book but I'll tell you what I didn't like about it anyway".

Negative reviews are very valuable, especially when they are well considered and thorough. Thanks again, this removes my self-pressure to read Hitchens instead of one of the 100s of other books I should read soon.

Anonymous said...

The ask and atheist meeting should be interesting. Be sure to say hi to Igor Dybal. Be sure to ask him about Hannibal Lector and his telepathic contact with another galaxy.

Should be a hoot.

Jon Voisey said...

Congrats on finally leaving a post in which you weren't a compete flaming troll, anon. And I will ask him. I expect he'll have something intelligent to say. That'll be a refreshing change after all your crap.

Anonymous said...

So what did the little Russian atheist have to say about Hannibal Lector?

TheBrummell said...

Thanks for the review. Most of the other reviews I've met of Hitchens' book have been along the lines of "Hitchens sucks and I know he's a bad man so I didn't bother to read his book but I'll tell you what I didn't like about it anyway".

Negative reviews are very valuable, especially when they are well considered and thorough. Thanks again, this removes my self-pressure to read Hitchens instead of one of the 100s of other books I should read soon.

Anonymous said...

The ask and atheist meeting should be interesting. Be sure to say hi to Igor Dybal. Be sure to ask him about Hannibal Lector and his telepathic contact with another galaxy.

Should be a hoot.