The devil in the details.

AuthorHanaoka, Mimi
PositionGod is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything - Critical essay

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything Christopher Hitchens (New York: Twelve Books, 2007), 307 pages.

The recent prominence of religion in academia and the public consciousness-not to mention the incessant hiss of commentary in the media--has underscored the importance of scholarship on religion. The study of religion is a relatively new academic phenomenon, and many religion departments were cleaved from university seminaries and their theology courses or cobbled together from extant regional studies departments. That scholarship on religion is increasing should be a happy event, but an unfortunate consequence has been a sometimes sloppy and misinformed body of work. Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is, curiously, the best of bad scholarship. His prose is articulate, his style is witty and his zeal is catching. What Hitchens lacks in substance--which is considerable--he abundantly compensates for in style.

Hitchens relishes his role as polemicist, and his assault on religion is articulate, but the central problem with Hitchens's argument is also what makes his tirade such a good read: his stubborn insistence on divorcing religion from political, social and economic concerns where no such distinction can be made. His refusal seems willfully obstinate. Hitchens dismisses the origins of religious experience as a Freudian nastiness whose purpose has long been dead and as a relic that "comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs)." (1) Hitchens declares that the case against God was made millennia ago, yet humanity in general is neither able nor willing to bury what he considers the long-dead carcass of religion. While Hitchens is resigned to the existence of religion, he valiantly mounts his case against it, and to this end he compiles a litany of offenses like a greedy child happily hoarding his toys. He insists that even beyond this catalogue there are "four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." (2) While Hitchens's invective is clever and unapologetic, it is ultimately weaker--though no less fun to read for his insistence on drawing a division between religious forces and worldly concerns where no such neat distinction exists.

Hitchens was awakened to the call of secularism at age nine when his teacher, charged with lessons about nature as well as scripture, apparently claimed, "So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the color that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange, how awful that would be." (3) Young Hitchens intuitively found this line of reasoning absurd. Hitchens's loathing of such arguments for intelligent design is undiminished today, but his discipline in researching his topic is slack. His aim in this book is unimaginably grand, and he naturally falls short of his goal of condemning as many religions as possible for as many reasons as possible. Failure, however, is seldom this enjoyably hyperbolic. Hitchens's criticisms range from the seemingly innocuous ("A Short Digression on the Pig; or, Why Heaven Hates Ham") to the philosophical ("Does Religion Make People Behave Better?") to the willfully provocative ("The 'New' Testament Exceeds the Evil of the 'Old' One"). (4)

Hitchens organizes his attacks thematically, launching his argument with a chapter entitled "Religion Kills." (5) Indeed, it is religiously affiliated violence that revolts and frustrates him most. Hitchens is rightfully infuriated by...

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