BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Book Review: God is not Great
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Book Review: God is not Great
Christopher Hitchens is journalist, a public intellectual, and an accomplished writer and scholar. His atheism is long-held, first arrived at as a boy (as related in the opening chapter of the book), and as he approaches the age of 60, he's had a lifetime of reflection, research, discussion, and debate to strengthen his positions. His book is the most accessible, humorous, and lively of the recent slew of best selling atheist titles, and it's masterfully written, with a flow, a rhythm, and a strong narrative voice throughout. It's a great example of how to construct a work of non-fiction for a general audience. I took many mental notes on his techniques.
The content is very good too, though not as wide ranging or scholarly as Dawkins' The God Delusion (review of that one coming soon). Hitchens' arguments are more personal and impassioned than the scientific and philosophic approaches favored by Dawkins and Harris. Hitchens hits on philosophy as well, but he's very good at personalizing the issues with examples and literature, history, current events, and his own very well-traveled life. I don't know if God is not Great is going to persuade anyone to give up their religion, but it's certainly a lively read, and I can imagine the faithful reading it and laughing and having a good time, even as they disagreed with or minimized every argument Hitchens made.
To the scores:
God is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, 2006 Concept: 6 Presentation: 8 Writing Quality: 9.5 Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 8 Entertainment Value: 8 Rereadability: 6 Overall: 9
I debated awarding a 10 on writing quality, something I'm not sure I've ever done for any book. I've certainly never done it for a non-fiction book, and may never, barring an Ebert-esque near death experience. I settled on a 9.5 since this book has nearly perfect flow and rhythm and pace, but could have been improved (if only just) on the order and presentation of material. It jumps around too much, at times. And yes, I'm nitpicking to justify my sub-perfect score on that issue.
Hitchens' attack on religion is thorough, and hits from countless angles. Just skimming the chapter titles on the books' incomplete Wikipedia page gives you a pretty clear idea of his approach, and having read the book I can say that he doesn't fail to deliver in chapters such as Religion Kills, The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False, The Nightmare of the Old Testament, The Tawdriness Of The Miraculous And The Decline Of Hell, Is Religion Child Abuse?, and others.
If you want a taste of the work, or just some enjoyable reading, Slate's hosting three excerpts; one in which Hitchens lays out his four principle objections to religion, and two other historically-themed entries; one on the fraudulent dubious origin of Mormonism, and the other on the similarly contentious foundation of Islam. If that's not enough, here's audio of Hitchens' reading Chapter Three, on "Why Heaven Hates Ham." It's just 9 minutes for 7 pages, and is the shortest and probably least consequential chapter in the book, but gives you some of the flavor of his work (bacon-y!) and should provide a few laughs as well.
Rather than summarize any further, I'll hit on a few nice bits I noted while reading, with my usual quotes and comments, though hopefully without my usual lengthy digressions, since I've got other reviews yet to write.
Here's a bit I liked from Chapter Seven, "The Nightmare of the Old Testament." I've got no comment on this one; I just thought it was well-written, especially the last few lines. It's also argumentatively devastating, simply by applying the iron jaws of objective logic to a subject that's traditionally treated with the fuzziest of kid gloves.
Another way religion betrays itself, and attempts to escape mere reliance on faith and instead offer "evidence" in the sense normally understood, is by argument from revelation. On certain very special occasions, it is asserted, the divine will was made known by direct contact with randomly selected human beings, who were supposedly vouchsafed laws that could then be passed on to those less favored.
These are some very obvious objections to be made to this. In the first place, several such disclosures have been claimed to occur, at different times and places, to hugely discrepant prophets or mediums. In some cases -- most notably the Christian -- one revelation is apparently not sufficient, and needs to be reinforced by successive apparitions, with the promise of a further but ultimate one to come. In other cases, the opposite difficulty occurs and the divine instruction is delivered, only once, and for the final time, to an obscure personage whose lightest word then becomes law. Since all of these revelations, many of them hopelessly inconsistent, cannot by definition be simultaneously true, it must follow that some of them are false and illusory. It could also follow that only one of them is authentic, but in the first place this seems dubious and in the second place it appears to necessitate religious war in order to decide whose revelation is the true one. A further difficulty is the apparent tendency of the Almighty to reveal himself only to unlettered and quasi-historical individuals, in regions of Middle Eastern wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition, and in many instances already littered with existing prophecies.
One of Hitchens' favored (and most effective) techniques is to detail a story from scripture, demonstrating clearly why it's such an awful thing when considered from a modern (largely secular) perspective, and then citing some historical examples or parallels to show how society actually is when such teachings/writings/moral lessons are taken literally (as the Bible clearly means to be taken).
For example, he starts off Chapter Fifteen: Religion as Original Sin, by bullet pointing some of the ways in which religion is not "just amoral, but positively immoral."
Presenting a false picture of the world to the innocent and the credulous.
The doctrine of blood sacrifice.
The doctrine of atonement.
The doctrine of eternal reward and/or punishment.
the imposition of impossible tasks and rules.
He's already covered the first, so he gets right to the issues of blood sacrifice. Historical citations are included, along with absurd and frightening stories about modern day farmers attempting to produce a spotlessly pure "red heifer" as mentioned in the book of Numbers, chapter 19, which is to be sacrificed on the site of the third temple in Jerusalem in effort to bring about the end of the world. No, really.
This is complicated by a lack of red heifers, and also by the fact that there is no third temple. The first temple was destroyed by the Romans (who ruled the Holy Land in those days) when the ancient Jews got too rebellious centuries before Jesus. A second temple was built on the same spot, and while it stood was the so called Golden Era of Jewish kings, including guys like Solomon and Herod. It too was destroyed by the Romans after another Jewish revolt, in around 70BC. (Yes, long after Jesus' death, but he was a minor prophet of very little historical consequence in his time, so his coming and going was largely irrelevant to the dominant Jewish culture/faith.) Prophecy says that the third temple must be built before the Messiah will return and the rapture will take place and all that other science fiction-y Left Behind stuff.
The problem (aside from the fact that grown adults are taking the mythological aspects of Bronze Age legends seriously) is that Temple Mount is the required site for the building, and it's already occupied by the Islamic "Dome of the Rock," a structure that's considered the third holiest site for the world's Muslims. (After temples in Mecca and Medina associated with events in the prophet Mohammad's life.) The reason there's a holy Muslim temple there is that Temple Mount is the spot that the quasi-historical Abraham was set to sacrifice his son for the glory of God, until an angel intervened and gave him a goat to butcher instead. Abraham was granted extremely long life for his willingness to engage in divinely-inspired infanticide, and when he died around 150 years later he was buried in a cave on the Temple Mount. (Or so goes the story.)
That cave is now a very holy spot for Jews and Muslims, (and Christians, to a lesser extent) since Abraham is a foundational patriarch in both religions. Jews trace their lineage through his son Issac, who was renamed Israel after a truly odd story about late night wrestling with a visiting angel. Hence "Israelites." Muslims trace their lineage through Abraham's other son, Ishmael, born to his concubine Hagar, who, along with the son, was exiled when Abraham's first wife, Sarah, got bitchy about the baby-momma.
The absurd nature of much of Jerusalem is well demonstrated by the Temple Mount, which is now under Israeli control, since they seized the land as part of the spoils of the Six Day War of 1967. The Israelis allow Muslims access to the site, but there are separate entrances to Abraham's (almost certainly fictional) tomb, and the Muslims and Jews pray at different altars within the cave. A memorable event took place there in 1994, as Hitchens explains on page 208.
An Israeli zealot named Dr. Baruch Goldstein had come to the cave and, unslinging the automatic weapon he was allowed to carry, discharged it into the Muslim congregation. He killed 27 worshippers and injured countless others before being overwhelmed and beaten to death. It turned out that many people already knew that Dr. Goldstein was dangerous. While serving as a physician in the Israeli army he had announced that he would not treat non-Jewish patients, such as Israeli Arabs, especially on the Sabbath. As it happens, he was obeying rabbinic law in declining to do this, as many Israeli religious courts have confirmed, so an easy way to spot an inhumane killer was to notice that he was guided by a sincere and literal observance of the divine instruction. Shrines in his name have been set up by the more doggedly observant Jews ever since, and of those rabbis who condemned his action, not all did so in equivocal terms. The curse of Abraham continues to poison Hebron, but the religious warrant for blood sacrifice poisons our entire civilization.
Here as elsewhere, Hitchens' point is that people who actually take their religion serious are the most dangerous. The counter argument from religious "moderates" is that sure, there are bloodthirsty and awful stories in the Bible, but that those are the exception, and that the vast majority of people don't take them seriously.
Which is true, but it's a truth that plays exactly into another of Hitchens' points; the moral value of holy books is only enhanced by secular considerations, which have watered down all the original, meanings. Which, I might remind you, are considered to be the inerrant word of God, which is why they're held as the source of all morality. The most devout Jew on Temple Mount that day in 1994 was Baruch Goldstein, and he acted exactly as would be expected of a true believer. That the vast majority of Jews, Muslims, Christians, etc, don't engage in mass murder of their religious enemies isn't evidence of the goodness of religion; it's evidence that most people (thankfully) don't (any longer) take very seriously the book(s) they claim to value so highly.
Worse yet, even if you leave aside the machine gun mass murder, consider what the people on that hill, Jews and Muslims both, are there to commemorate. A story about a man dragging his son off into the wilderness, armed with a sharp knife he had every intention of using to cut the throat of his own child, for the glory and pleasure of his God. A God he believed in more strongly than anyone in modern day Jerusalem. Well, anyone but Baruch Goldstein, perhaps. And Abraham's attempted act (infanticide avoided only at the last instant thanks to biblical intervention in the form of an angel) is not some minor bit of the Bible, but is considered one of the best things in it; one of the best moral instructors in the whole book. Obey any order you think comes from God without question. Like say, machine gunning hundreds of unarmed religious penitents?
(Bonus trivia, courtesy of my fading memories from an Italian Renaissance art class I took last semester. The importance of Abraham's act of attempted infanticide was considered such a great moral example that it was the scene chosen to serve as the subject for the contest to win the commission to forge the Baptistery Doors in Florence. Competition squares from Ghilberti and Brunelleschi survive, and are considered two of the earliest sculptural masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. Ghilberti won, since his sculptural style was more traditional and his casting technique more expert and less expensive. This loss so upset Brunelleschi that he went, with his friend Donatello (yes, that Donatello), to live in Rome for several years, where they made extensive study of ancient Roman sculpture and architecture, learning new ways of portraying proportions and structure and greatly influencing the Renaissance in a classical direction.)
There's tons more good stuff in Hitchens' book, but much of it is good because of how well he writes and presents it, and there's no point in me quoting it, when you should really just read the book yourself. My copy's gone back to the library, but I will definitely read it again someday, just to enjoy and observe how well Hitchens incorporates a common thematic element and how well he weaves a consistent narrative voice into the work.
As an acting Christian, this has always been one thing I've been utterly unable to reconcile. Why has the Bible been cast as the word of God? It was written by humans, rewritten by other humans probably dozens or hundreds of times over, and then ultimately compiled and edited by the same Catholic establishment that would later nearly self implode due to their unveiled unholiness.
Even if the God's first conduits who wrote the first draft DIDN'T put their spin on it, why do we believe that nobody thereafter did, when it is historically documented that the Catholic church did? Hell, the translation of the Bible alone has removed much of its original flavor.
Oh, and you damned close minded atheists need to leave us alone, etc etc.
