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God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
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Average Rating:  out of 806 Reviews
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Price: $24.99
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Sale: $12.52
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Manufacturer: Twelve Books, Hachette Book Group
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780446579803
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Christopher Hitchens
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Publisher: Twelve Books, Hachette Book Group
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Dewey Decimal Number: 200
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Publication Date: 2007-05-01
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Reading Level: 307
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Description: 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.
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: Sort of on the right track, but jibberish: TRASHY THEORY which HURTS the cause. NO FACT, NO PROOF. |
Date: 2008-11-20 |
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Details: Besides the fact that Hitchens's premise equates his BELIEF in a non-existent "God" with religion -- which is far from the truth (G*d is not religious, what a radical idea!) -- his writing is far too pseudo-intellectually written in faux Old English, circa 1700. Very, very difficult to read. You'll have to read every sentence 3 or 4 or 5 times. (And yet, I have a post-graduate degree.) His thoughts are all over the place. He refers to things like "it," or "the book," or "that" and we have no idea to what he is referring without careful study and rereading.
He gets his facts wrong as well. For example, jumping to page 113 (just bad luck, I guess), he refers to "Barbelo" in the Nag Hammadi Library as "a heavenly destination, a motherland beyond the stars," whereas it is correctly defined as a non-visible, feminine intermediary ASPECT of the divine, a "REALM" from which "Christ" comes--or IS. (It is actually a very poetic reference to something very real, something you can find out about in detail in an Amazon book that CHANGED MY LIFE forever: "BRAINMAN-HOW ANCIENT MAN USED FORBIDDEN BRAIN SCIENCE TO CONTACT TRUE GOD & INVENT THE HOLY GRAIL.")
Strangely, Hitchens, in "God Is Not Great," refers to "God" and "Jesus" (for example) by name and as "He" as if "they" existed. This would be contradictory to his "principles" which he presents. Perhaps the only thing he is correct about (right from the beginning) is that religion is HARMFUL. Unfortunately, he also equates religion with God, which is NOT correct. Religion is NOT God, God is NOT religion, and God is not religious.
"God Is Not Great?" Which God? See, like most atheists, he actually DOES believe in only one God--the "God" the religious define as "God"--and then proceeds to reject it. This not only doesn't make sense, but precludes pursuing any OTHER "God," as yet unknown by most, like the one from / in "Barbelo" as defined in "gospels" banned as heretical by the Catholic Church because it conflicts with their exclusive trademark on "God."
In the end, Hitchens merely presents more and more individual, unprovable BELIEFS and THEORIES rather than hard fact. What we need now is FACTUAL PROOF and we finally got it. (Click here if you're looking for facts and proof:)
BRAINMAN-HOW ANCIENT MAN USED FORBIDDEN BRAIN SCIENCE TO CONTACT TRUE GOD & INVENT THE HOLY GRAIL (Black & White Edition)
(Or here:)
BRAINMAN-HOW ANCIENT MAN USED FORBIDDEN BRAIN SCIENCE TO CONTACT TRUE GOD & INVENT THE HOLY GRAIL (Full-Color Edition)
And, like most atheists, Hitchens is just as firm in his BELIEFS (NOT FACTS) as religious people and far from open-minded. He places extreme FAITH in [his understanding of] present-day science, implicitly making the assumption that science knows everything. It DOESN'T. (In fact, everyday, scientists -- including medical scientists -- announce that they were wrong about yet another thing, having allegedly discovered something new, which tomorrow they will undoubtedly recant.) For someone to place 100% faith in science is just as irrational as placing faith in the dogma of an organized religion claiming to magically turn wine into blood and unleavened bread into flesh of a 2000-year-old, dead god-man. Apparently, Hitchens is unaware of the fact that, in the middle ages, the Catholic Church banned scientific study of various things and persecuted and executed those who disobeyed. This was an attempt to 1) erase a science that science now knows nothing about, and 2) distance "religion" from science, especially this FORBIDDEN science--which REVEALED the actual "realm of 'Christ'" (very different from Church dogma).
And what of Hitchens's own scientific credentials? He is a liberal arts "professor" at the highly acclaimed New School in Manhattan. Oh... He is also a part-time contributing writer at the highly scientific magazine "Vanity Fair." Please! Amazing how someone so unschooled in science can place so much FAITH in their own extremely limited understanding of the vast field science.
I find that different people will see the same work in different ways because their minds are too busy reading their OWN thoughts. Everything they see or read is "filtered" by their own constant internal debate. Author writes "blue" and person A reads "green" while person B reads "red." Whoever gave this a good review was seeing something different from what was actually on the page.
I will return this trash.
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Review Summary: Oh please!!!!!!!!!!!!!! |
Date: 2008-11-19 |
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Details: YAWN!!! Same old, same old. This is the best of atheism? This guy would probably (or perhaps definitely) beat me in an argument where you need to think fast. But with a little reflection most of his arguments are like shouting into the wind. Anyone can make an argument by using straw men. Maybe I'm naive, but this man reminds me of the bloke who stuck his chair in the surf and tried to tell the tide not to come in! He may in fact be one of the most religious of us all ... but is he right? (PS. When are we going to get an atheist who understands "Biblical Theology" rather than simply a familiarity with "Systematic Theology"?) |
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Review Summary: essential DISCLAIMER |
Date: 2008-11-13 |
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Details: Staffers for an organization called Campus Crusade for Christ are responsible for allegations that I (Lucifer) and Christopher Hitchens are in cahoots; and that no one -- not even a born-again evangelical Christian -- can read either Hitchens' GOD IS NOT GREAT or Lucifer's TRUE HISTORY OF EVERYTHING without falling into apostasy, atheism, and eternal damnation.
If you should receive that email from Campus Crusade for Christ, please delete it. That's not just Jesus "spam." It is a load of Hersey's chocolate-chip crapola.
Hitchens is a man whose courage and intelligence I greatly admire. But I utterly deny that "Lucifer" is a pseudonym.
For the record: Lucifer's online "True History of Everything" (graciously hosted by BobShakespeare) presents an accurate eyewitness account of human events, from Day One until yesterday. When composing it, I received zero help from Chris HItchens; nor any help from Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, or the holy Ghost. It's my own goddamned story. And it's totally true.
Second, I deny CCC allegations that my blog is "responsible for church closings all across North America," particularly where members of the congregation were allegedly "infected" by "Lucifer's blasphemies, lies, and left-wing politics" (CCC chain email). Among the flocks that are said to have been "seduced" into apostasy by L's "True History" are congregations of "the Conemaugh Presbyterian Church in Johnstown, PA; the United Methodist Church in Atlanta, GA; the First Baptist Church of Greenfield, MA; St. Patrick's Anglican Church in Lucan, Ontario; and the Trenton Presbyterian Church in Paint Rock Valley, AL; to name just a few."
I grant that all of those churches closed their doors this autumn, after their respective congregations got bored with Jesus and Yahweh. I grant that many parents now stay home on Sunday to play ball with their kids, or to mow the lawn, or to roll on the floor laughing out loud at L's TRUE HISTORY, or at Chris's GOD IS NOT GREAT. But is that my fault?
You can't blame every church closing for the past two years on the serpentine attractions of my true-history blog. You have to blame some of those failed churches on the books of Christopher Hitchens.
And we are NOT the same person, god damn it!
--L
P.S. Hey, Chris, if you should happen to read this: on Saturday I lost a cufflink from that set given to me by Joan Baez. It's not worth much but the thing has sentimental value. Would you mind looking for it under your passenger seat? Thanks, pal.
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Review Summary: pipsqueekish. |
Date: 2008-11-11 |
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Details: As a science teacher, I definetely enjoyed Hitchens' debasement of Intelligent Design and agree with him wholeheartedly, but keeping the overaching context of this book in mind, i was left with no choice but to offer one lonely star as a rating. I apologize in advance for the redundancy of my arguments that follow which simply restate the same idea from different vantage points. I believe my argument precludes the necessity (at least to my mind) of examining surface minutia, and subsumes them just the same.
Hitchens, in typical myopic atheist fashion, throws out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Being an "atheist" myself (with qualifications not expressible here), I have come to make a distinction between the external (exoteric) forms of religion: idols, statues, rites, laws, etc, and internal (esoteric) experience: the actual "religious" experience itself. The former is for the masses, mistaking the outer forms for the totality of religious experience, while the latter is for very few indeed. Hitchens believes he is critiquing religion, when actually he is judging only those that adhere, to varying degrees, to its outer forms. He makes no distinction between those who remain at the simple level of belief (evangelists as an extreme example), and those who through deeper practice transcend mere belief, paradoxically undermining common notions of religion entirely. There is a saying in Zen for example: a master tells his student, "if you see Buddha in the road, kill him", another way of saying, don't take the forms (signs) to be the experience. Hitchens only gets it partially right: he critiques those who simply BELIEVE, but evidently has little or no knowledge of those who have "gone the distance" (though he thinks he does). One must also be aware of those who profess to have higher vision, when in fact they fool themselves and those who feed at their trough. These are an easy target for Hitchens, and so they should be. Anybody can critique religion from this level, which makes this such a boring read.
His critique of Buddhism is laughable and demonstrates little knowledge on even the most superficial level. He cites those who completely misrepresent the deeper levels of the system and use Buddhism for their own means, Hitchens believes he is actually critiquing Buddhism. In fact, he is critiquing a bastardized appropriation, but he doesn't realize (nor can he) that he's doing so. Unfortunately, this misinformed appropriation is pretty much the history of religion (all of them), so in this respect Hitchens' attacks are right on. But his transgression is that he is not altogether different than those he judges: the latter in ignorance adheres to outer forms alone, sustained by simple belief, while the former disavows the whole shebang, without knowledge of religious depth. Hitchens believes he has come to the table to critique the main course, but in fact, by predictable default, has only examined the digested end products, i.e. the excrement of religious history. As a critic of that excrement, he is nonpareil, a master among Plato's "chained men". If I wrote a book entitled "A Critical Look at the Citizens of China", and in the book I based my judgement of these citizens exclusively by the actions of the totalitarian regime at the top, I would be doing a disservice not only to Chinese citizens, but to my readers. A gross prejudice and incompleteness, don't you think? A one star foray..yes?
I recall a student of mine saying " Just look what science has done to our environment." She failed to realize that the laws of science are immutable - the facts of physical reality, and as such "do" nothing. It is what WE DO with that knowledge. Similarly, deep religious experience is ahistorical, and operates outside temporal, political trappings (the food of the MASSes). Fundamental truths, embodied in contemplative traditions and realizable only through direct experience, are neither for zealots, nor critics. Yes, "many have died in the name of religion," but via adherence to its metamorphosed dogmatized forms. These are propagated by those in power, and sustained by those who simply follow along The very same become the poster children of spiritual tradition and easy fodder for bottom feeder critics like Hitchens, ignorant of higher esoteric dimensions which ALWAYS arise from a condition of compassion and non-violence.
Hitchens demonstrates, in an ignorance more acute with each chapter, that like his religious literalist counterparts, has absolutely no feeling for analogy, metaphor, mythic interpretation and mythic invariance - all functioning as signs which point toward deeper dimensions of human awareness. in the long run he has simply critiqued the literalists - exemplifying a distinguishing characteristic of scientific tunnel-vision - a form of dogma not unlike that of religion.
The unfolding of authentic spiritual dimensions (Samadhi, Satori, Kensho, Rigpa, etc, and not precludng a neurological interpretation if one wishes), fostered by practice, and transmitted via a TRUE adept, is not for Hitchens, or fundementalists, evangelists, new agers, and 99.9999% of us. It is that .0001% that poke holes in the argument (though none would bother). HOWEVER, One need not be part of the ".0001% club" to understand the narrowness of Hitchens' complaint. For the lesser among us, understanding that level, at least, requires keen discernment, a task undoubtedly too daunting for the run of the mill atheist (or theist for that matter), who invariably mistake the tree for the forest. Secularists are as uninformed as those they critique; Atheist-Theist, two sides of one coin - "surface dwellers" one and all.
It is amusing, after centuries of religious examination, discussion, and critique, by some pretty heavy hitters, that some reviewers above presume that Mr Hitchens has finally figured it all out for us and got it right. Now there's some dogma for you. "God is not Great" is not the full-bodied examination that the reviewers on the back cover suggest, but is in fact just another White Zinfandel on the shelf. |
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Review Summary: logical, but superficial to some extent |
Date: 2008-11-10 |
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Details: 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. |
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