God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

English language

Published Dec. 30, 2009

ISBN:: 978-0-446-69796-5

(1 review)

In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris's recent bestseller, The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

12 editions

Thom reviewed God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

Review of 'God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This is the first I've read from Christopher Hitchens, a stunning intellectual and anti-theist (see the title). The gist of this book is that religion is basically totalitarianism, and between those two you can fix the blame for 99% of the evil in the world - even up to the present day. Between the Islamic exhortations to violence and the Fundamentalist opposition of science, I can certainly see his point. When people do good things is not generally at the behest of religion but instead humanism at work - another fair point. Definitely worth the time to read.