"God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything"

Christopher Hitchens' new book is a blitz of body blows to religion, many of them on the mark and all of them intelligent and provocative. If your religion is something you value, be prepared for an almost exhausting read. I do, however, feel strongly that his book – these arguments – serve a valuable purpose. People of any faith need not cower under an onslaught of opposing ideas. An equally ineffective response would be merely to dismiss his arguments as false. Any person of faith would be well served to digest the ideas from the book. The process, I believe, is useful to prune our own beliefs; strengthening the core of our faith while discarding the ideas that really are manmade.

In this modest blog I could not hope to do justice to the book; neither to affirm the valid points nor to answer the few areas of leaky logic I was able to identify. To a great extent, I believe C.H. mistitles his book. After reading it, I think it would be more aptly titled "religion is not Great: How religion Poisons Everything." C.H.'s criticisms against religion are:

1. the usefulness of religion is in the past;
2. its foundational books are transparent fables;
3. it is a man-made imposition;
4. it has been the enemy of science and inquiry;
5. it has subsisted largely on lies and fears; and
6. has been the accomplice of ignorance and guilt, slavery, genocide, racism and tyranny.

I think C.H. is mostly right here. To the extent you disagree with C.H.'s criticisms, you most likely only think C.H. is wrong about YOUR religion, but exactly right about the other charlatans!

To appreciate C.H.'s concern for the damage religion has done and is doing to humankind, people of faith need to step back and take a global perspective. Religion continues to be the dominant tool of war and genocide, against science and inquiry, and bullying of the population that would not be endured from secular sources. To the extent religion has reformed its positions on these matters, it has done so as a result of losing its ability to kill or otherwise ostracize those opposing its views. In the areas of the world where religion still has this ability to silence its opponents, religion does, often in barbaric fashion. To those of you who might think that Christian religion is no longer the enemy of inquiry, I offer that just this week on my local cable access channel I saw a local Christian minister say, "Do you know how to tell if the devil is behind something? It's followed by a question mark." In 2007, people are paying this person to tell them they should not question.

If I can identify one major flaw in his book, it is that C.H. conflates his view of God (if there were a god) with his view of religion. But doesn't C.H.'s argument that religion is manmade undercut any attempt to tie God to religions made in his name? Every religion on Earth is wrong in some or many things. The attributes of God as delivered through man's writings in sacred texts are malleable, incorrect or misconstrued. Cannot these be true and yet God still exist and not quite in the form any person believes? Another battery of arguments against God's existence can be grouped under the heading The Problem of Evil. Assuming God created humankind, does a wretched humankind make unavoidable a wretched God? C.H. addresses whether free will is an adequate explanation and rebuts it rather strongly. But in this I find it merely a matter of disagreement. God preventing any evil from befalling moral people would certainly be strong evidence of God's existence. But wouldn't such strong evidence erode my ability to choose freely?

The bottom line for me with this book is that it demonstrates just how horribly religion has screwed up humankind's view of God. Religion has not only outlived its usefulness, religion is responsible for turning more people away from God than any secular influence. At this writing, the book is 2 on the NYT Bestseller list and has been in the top few spots all 10 weeks it has been out. Like problems of global poverty or political oppression, if the institutions are creating or perpetuating the problem (and in this case I am positing that creating hurdles between people and God is a problem), what can I do?