God is Not Great - book review

I suppose Christopher Hitchens went for cute and catchy when he modified the phrase "God is Great" to create the title of this book. Had he gone for accuracy the title would have been "Religion is not great" rather than God is Not Great. Of course for Hitchens there may be little distinction between god and religion especially since he feels that both are a product of human imagination.

Early on in the book, Hitchens describes an encounter between religious talk show host Dennis Praeger and himself in which Praeger asked the question: "You are in a strange city. Night is coming on. A large group of men approaches you. Would you feel more safe or less safe if you knew these men were coming from a prayer meeting?" It sounded like Praeger really expected the prayer meeting to be the kind that Praeger would hold but this isn't what the problem states. And Hitchens easily answers less safe with just a few cases, namely Belfast, Bombay, Beirut, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. I'm sure you recognize at least half of these vacation destinations as ones that warn visitors (if any) that there may be civil disturbances.

He proceeds to describe how religion impedes the progress of science and discovery of natural law, how it took the Catholic church hundreds of years to apologize for persecuting Galileo. And while the religious right continue to debate intelligent design, real biologists are using Darwin's Theory of Evolution to predict and design new organisms that may be the next wave of health care solutions. Hitchens takes an extremely hard line that religion isn't just a harmless waste of time but that it is a nefarious, irrational, poison that corrupts everything it is involved with. Give Hitchens any example of religion doing good and he will counter with an example of how more or better good would have been done had religion not interfered.

I found the book compelling but not as well organized as some of his earlier works. It's as if he has a few loose ends to tie up or some arguments from previous books that he has done more research on and now wants to publish. Definitely a good book for those who want to know more about the thinking of an intellectual atheist.