God Is Not Great
2007 • 307 pages
Ratings33
Average rating4
15
Ratings33
Average rating4
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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A bit too unphilosophical & journalistic (e.g. I can't get over the feeling that Hitchens was writing the book with the tv and the news on: this version of reality, however official it may be, is not relevant for me). I prefer Michel Onfray's version of Nietzschean atheism and I wonder why there are so few philosophers in the atheist controversion: it's almost like the theologians and scientists (more exactly authors writing either for God or for science) do all the talking. Still Hitchens is a wonderful rhetorician and a master of argumentative discourse and as an atheist, I had much to learn from him. And to paraphrase a recent article by Lesley Chamberlain on Nietzsche from the Guardian (07.02.2012 – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/feb/07/political-message-nietzsche-god-is-dead?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038): we should distrust the God of Reason and with him, all the Enlightenment. We need a deeper, more complex (even more ambiguous) atheism!
