God Is Not Great

This book title is well known and roundly criticized by various religions, but I think the majority of the criticize is not actually read it. It does not say anything specifically AGAINST any religion other than that which is already known. But I can see Christians, Muslims, and religious Jews in particular having a lot of trouble with it, because he points out aspects that are already known but rationalized away.
I admit that as a Reform Jew I do my own rationalizing away to make my own belief system "acceptable and reasonable" in some sense, but there you are…
As I say, this book doesn't actually introduce any new knowledge, but it puts it all in one place, and it points out a lot of religious fallacies and inconsistencies. Fortunately, I knew, going in, what I was in for, and the kaleidoscope of facts – although disheartening – is not overly surprising.
As a skeptic and scientist, I find the thought of religion overall to be more than a little suspect, and Mr. Hitchens puts it all together. I admit that I am not comfortable calling myself an atheist, and I definitely do consider myself Jewish, but that doesn't mean that the God nonsense is reasonable.

"God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" by Christopher Hitchens is a a stirring defense of humanism and a well-crafted critique with a startling premise: that all religion is a malevolent force in the world and has retarded human progress. No matter where you reside on the battle lines of this issues, one cannot deny that Hitchens has written an impassioned work that stirs the mind and intellect.

My initial impression of this book was that it was a dogmatic atheist screed. I consider myself a humanist but have not engaged with the belief in a complete way. The book is more than a diatribe against religion but an inspiring defense of reason, intellect, and morality, which are not derived from religion. It calls upon the reader to try to find wonder and magnificence in the universe around us. He writes "If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful,- and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding- than any creation or "end-of-days" stories." Humanism, the belief that humans can live moral, ethical lives without the belief in or need for a deity, is a far more compelling system for humanity than many of the religious systems fundamentally laced with violence at their very foundations.

The real strength of this book comes from Hitchens' strength as a writer and author. He has created well crafted, well reasoned arguments against religion, arguing that they are from the "childhood of our species." His biggest point is that we must see religions for what they are: man-made creations, most thousands of years removed from our current circumstances. These arguments are made with confidence, not hubris as many claim. They are also not blind attacks but ones based on evidence and reason. I do not feel he is attacking the religious person necessarily but the system in which they find themselves. He is not an "angry evangelical atheist" but a man who constantly questions and learns about his surroundings. The weakness of this book is that I would have like to have seen a longer book that got further into his arguments, which taken individually feel thin. On the whole, the book is an excellent and thought provoking argument that will make everyone from the avowed atheist to the pious practitioner ask fundamental questions about the universe and the human condition.

This is the last of the Four Horsemen's books that I have read (and I heartily recommend all of them), and I was putting this one off because I assumed it might be something of a retread -- choir-preaching, if you will. Indeed, if you have seen Hitchens debate or appear on television, you've come across a lot of what is in this book. What in one unified tome, God is Not Great is an excellent and quick read, at that (though perhaps more like a series of related essays than a single narrative, particularly in the second to last section which is something of a truncation of Jennifer Hecht's "Doubt: A History"). Happily, I can also say that even though it is Hitchens it, like the books of Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, is not arrogant, it is not mean-spirited. Hitchens takes this subject very seriously, sees real consequences to superstition and theism, and makes a hard-nosed, unapologetic case. Confidence is not arrogance, telling hard truths is not mean. You may find more to disagree with in the more nuanced political positions he takes, but his case against religion is compelling.