Hitchens: god is not great

Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything finally made it to the top of my reading list. Hitchens assaults every aspect of religion with erudition and wit. It is a wonderfully entertaining polemic, at least for the religious skeptic. The devout, I am sure, have other feelings about it.

Some book reviewers have taken him to task for not consulting the relevant scholarship within the philosophy of religion. That misses the point of the book. He is not trying to debate or persuade the faithful. He merely documents religion’s often wildly inconsistent sets of beliefs and its toxic nature. Those who follow religious debate and arguments have probably heard it before.

Religion is not going away anytime soon. It appears somehow religion comes naturally to the species. In the meantime, it never hurts to remind oneself of the inconsistencies and evils of religion regardless its benefits.

So, if you are looking for philosophical arguments against religion, don’t bother with the book. If you are looking for an entertaining read that stylishly, moreover, forcibly drives some of the usual points against religion home, dial up Hitchens.