"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.