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September 11, 2007
God is Not Great
One of my myriad birthday presents from Adam was Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I finally started reading it last night. I guess it is an apt remembrance of 9/11/2001 to bury myself in indictment of religion. I still haven't read Dawkins' new book (though I have read other of his books and many articles and essays), and I read Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, but lest you think all this atheist drivel is the same, I can assure you that these authors are about as different as you can get, but what unites them is a very reasoned (if not always completely objective) observation of the role religion plays in history, culture, and politics, and what's wrong with that picture. Whatever your state of belief or unbelief, Hitchens is a challenging thinker and an extremely entertaining writer. He has also traveled extensively and interacted with people of all faiths, all over the globe. He's not just some guy sitting in his ivory tower thinking about all this stuff without experiencing it.
Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.
—Christopher Hitchens, from "Putting it Mildly," chapter one of God is Not Great