{"id":218,"date":"2007-07-22T12:34:41","date_gmt":"2007-07-22T10:34:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=218"},"modified":"2007-07-22T12:34:41","modified_gmt":"2007-07-22T10:34:41","slug":"god-is-not-great-by-christopher-hitchens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/god-is-not-great-by-christopher-hitchens\/","title":{"rendered":"God is Not Great – by Christopher Hitchens"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you had asked me a week ago what I thought of this book, I’d have answered — “It’s much more readable than Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion<\/a>.
\nThat’s not what I think now.
\nWriting books debunking religion is a good thing, and there are many of them. But I was hoping for a more powerful and effective book by Hitchens, who certainly knows how to write well.<\/p>\n


\nGod Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything<\/a> is not a long book and there are certainly parts of it that are powerful.
\nBut Hitchens has a tendency to ramble, particularly towards the end.
\nAnd in his noble effort to be equally brutal with all religions — the job he does on Hinduism and Buddhism is particularly effective — the effect lessens somewhat when you actually know a thing or two about the religion in question.
\nLike Hitchens, I am an atheist and have been so my entire life. Indeed, I wouldn’t use the term “atheist” to describe myself — that’s like calling oneself an “infidel” or “non-believer”. It’s defining oneself in religious terms, by what one does not<\/strong> believe. I prefer to describe myself philosophically as all Marxists do — as a materialist.
\nUnlike Hitchens, I am not totally unsympathetic to certain elements of the religious faith embraced by most of my people. And because of that, I was struck by how limited Hitchens’ own knowledge of that faith could be at times.
\nOne example will suffice: In writing about the Jewish holiday of Hannukah, Hitchens says:
\n“For once instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with ‘Christmas’ …”
\nThis may well be the experience that Hitchens knows, having presumably spent some time with American Jews. But it is not the experience of Hannukah for Israeli Jews, where the holiday borrows nothing from Christianity and has a unique character all its own. (It is not, for example, the holiday where Israelis give gifts to their children.)
\nAs a celebration of the uprising of an oppressed people<\/strong> against a vicious empire, it has long appealed to left-wing Jews. And to many of us, the bit about the Hannukah “miracle” — the burning of the oil for 8 days — is the least interesting part of the holiday. Hannukah is about the survival of a a feisty nation facing overwhelming odds.
\nIn Hitchens’ account of the holiday, the Romans are clearly cast in the roles of good guys, the carriers of Athenian philosophy and enlightenment, and the rebellious Jews as the worst sort of ignorant, oppressive religious fanatics. Maybe a better approach would have been to support neither Rome nor Jerusalem, but to call for a Third Camp<\/a>?
\nThat having been said, it’s a minor quibble. Most of the book makes the case well.
\nThe problem is, are any religious people going to read it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you had asked me a week ago what I thought of this book, I’d have answered — “It’s much more readable than Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. That’s not what I think now. Writing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}