By the time I finished Christopher Hitchens’ new book about his life-long struggle with the various Gods in his life, “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” I was sick of it. God, religion, the book, and mostly Hitchens himself. It is the book of a smart ass, an enfant terrible, a book of a man who has been everywhere and found no resting place.Click on the source link to read the whole thing:
It is made up of junk history, junk scholarship and finally turns out to be junk apostasy. The subtitle gives the essential clue to the book (and probably to Hitchens himself). The book is too personal and the poison is in the eye of the beholder. It is a pitiless screed that is unrelenting and eventually tiresome.
It is difficult to understand why he wrote the book since there is nothing in it that hasn’t been written before in the long history of atheism. All of his criticisms are well known and obvious—organized religion has encouraged killing of millions in wars; it has fostered ignorance and superstition which results in unhealthy practices; it has fought reason, science, and modern thought; it is full of inconsistencies, errors, impossibilities and irrational assertions all in the service of superstition. Others have written about all these issues more thoughtfully and in more depth. Hitchens’ main contribution is that he wants to destroy all religions and the idea of God altogether.
SOURCE: Horsefeathers; SCORECARD: GOD 1---HITCHENS 0; 11 June 2007
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2 comments:
Are your beliefs not strong enough to know in your heart that what you believe is true? Will attempting to publicly proclaim that a view that opposes your own to be nothing more than “junk” indicate a decree of how threatened your beliefs are? You may wish to minimalize and/or rationalize that your post is nothing of the sort, but call it what you will, you’re still [in-directly] verbally attacking/slandering that author. If you were secure enough in your beliefs and in yourself, you’d have no reason to bash someone – especially someone who has an opposing set of beliefs. That says a lot about YOUR character. You’ve overstepped your bounds. As your mommy has certainly taught you at one point or another, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” I don’t know about you, but I am sick of the hypocrisy – from all sides.
I'm with anonymous on this one.
On my own, without any pressure from satan or those nasty hateful atheists, I read Mr. Hitchens book.
I was pleased to see that someone had the balls to say it right out on the cover.
God is not GREAT How Religion Poisons Everything.
It's been my own belief for years that once we get by past the big bang and the unmoved mover bit it has been pretty quiet on the direct communication issue.
The rest of our belief system has been built around personal "scapegods".
The purpose of these imaginary dieties is to provide someone to blame for all the things that are going wrong in the real world, a means to justify our less than noble actions against the interests of others just to make our stay in this life a more pleasant one, a divine pissing contest to determine which imaginary god wins the contest as the BEST imaginary god, or as a crutch to carry us through a crisis.
The only legitimate use of an imaginary god is the last mentioned.
Even our subconscious, generates a memory block in order to help us survive the trauma of a horrible event or situation that we may find ourselves in.
There are no atheist in the foxhole idea.
If there is eternity, it is what we pass along in our DNA.
Here's to a long quiet rest when my eyes close for the last time.
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