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In “God is not Great” Christopher Hitchens undertook an unrelenting attack on religion. From the opening page he showed his approach with the example of the otherwise apparently admirable Christian lady Mrs Jean Watts, who played a pleasant part in Hitchens childhood until she over-stepped the mark and suggested that God made vegetation green so it would be easier on the human eye.
What is remarkable about this example is that it tells us more about Hitchens than Watts. She is abusively labelled an “old trout” out of nowhere, simply because of one relatively innocuous statement probably made quite lightly, yet treated as if it was a full papal edict and myopically scrutinized minutely.
Suddenly all the admirable qualities of this lady are forgotten and she is defined purely on one comment that is interpreted by Hitchens as he wishes in order to justify his categorization of her. This sets the pattern for the rest of the book, with the notable exception that while Jean Watts at least gets an initial word or two in her favour, that veneer of balance and fairness is dropped and seldom if ever resurfaces in the entire book.
His predictable treatment of the “blood and gore soaked” bible is another example of this biased approach. Regardless of what you think of the bible, there is a huge amount of good in it, including the call to forgive your enemies, love your neighbour, judge not others but look to your own faults first, all things are lawful, and hardships in life should be viewed as an opportunity for growth and learning. It takes a special kind of blinkered approach to see nothing but the bad stuff, but that’s an approach Hitchens had perfected.
Hitchens seemed to be a man possessed with a need to create an enemy (in this case all religious people), label them as the source of all evil, and then cite selective cases in isolation while ignoring any evidence that contradicted the picture he wished to paint. ("Religion poisons EVERYTHING")
Words like negative, sarcastic, self-righteous, deliberately dishonest, asinine, and bigoted spring to mind to describe his approach. He is like a school yard bully viciously inciting a mob to surround a child with a religious background and accuse them of everything from rape, slavery, sexual repression, misogyny, human sacrifice, and of course genocide. Hitchens himself says that if he was accused of such things, even if he knew he wasn’t guilty of them, he would be tempted to commit suicide, yet his entire approach encouraged people to apply such prejudiced accusations to others equally as innocent, which is appallingly hypocritical.
The problem for Hitchens was of course that no church and virtually no religious person in any democratic Western county today fitted his picture, so he constantly dredged up ancient history and times when religion and government were one in order to justify his lurid fantasies.
While he claims religion appeals to the darkest and most primal side of humanity, he himself wrote like a tribal elder telling scary stories around a camp fire to wide eyed children of religious monsters waiting in the darkness to consume them. None of his caricatures fit the many religious people I’ve met, indeed Hitchens himself lets the cat out of the bag by admitting that he has religious friends who he wishes would “just leave me alone”.
If "religion poisons everything" as he claims continuously, then why have religious friends at all? Is it because they were in reality decent people who didn’t fit the picture he tried to paint? And if he wished they would leave him alone, why didn’t he just tell them? Was he suffering the cognitive dissonance of realizing they made it difficult for him to maintain his hateful public image in the reality of his private life?
I welcome specific criticism of religion where it is targeted at the people and organizations responsible. I reject the approach of generalized stereotypes, prejudice and bigotry against any group of people including the religious. This book is little more than a modern atheist version of “Mein Kampf” that encourages people to stop treating other human beings as they find them, and instead to relate to them according to a label, in this case “religious”.
You’d think in this day and age we’d have gotten past this kind of propaganda, but sadly it appears bigotry never dies, it just changes sides. Hitchens was certainly a great writer, and if you’re not careful you’ll fall under the spell he weaves. But ask yourself these questions; are his statements backed up by any metrics at all (rather than isolated examples) that support his generalized conclusions? And do the religious people you know act in accordance with the caricatures Hitchens paints?
I’m not questioning that there is some truth in much of what Hitchens wrote. What I am questioning is that it automatically applies to the majority of religious people today, and that it’s ever right to apply generalized stereotypes universally, the very definition of prejudice.
I also wonder whether in being so abrasive, sarcastic and abusive Hitchens projected an attitude that produced a negative reaction towards him from religious people that confirmed in his own mind the truth of his assertions. As a wise man once said; what you reap you will also sow.
Hitchens seemed to match the worst in religion; judgment of others, self-righteousness, and a blinkered narrow approach, while failing to match the best of religion; empathy, compassion, understanding, forgiveness. It’s a shame that an otherwise intelligent man should leave as one of his main legacies a book containing so much gratuitously hateful and childish sarcasm against his fellow human beings. We can only hope it’s not an approach widely adopted by fair minded people on both sides of the philosophical divide, however human nature being what it is, don't hold your breath.
- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Twelve (April 6, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0446697966
- ISBN-13: 978-0446697965
- Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.9 x 5.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
- Average Customer Review: 2,299 customer reviews
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#16,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8 in Atheism (Books)
- #16 in Religion & Philosophy
- #4 in Rationalist Philosophy
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