book review: God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Author:
Christopher Hitchens
Publisher:
Twelve Books
Date of Publication:
2007
ISBN:
978-0446579803
Rating:
8
Summary:
I listened to this book over this past summer but haven’t had a chance to write a review of it until now. I picked it up, of course, because I am an atheist and because it was getting a lot of press.
Hitchens starts out by detailing his personal experience with religion - he was raised religious but was a skeptic early on (which is actually common for a lot of atheists; see Altemeyer and Hunsberger’s 2006 book). His skepticism led him to realize there are a lot of inconsistencies in religious dogma. By his teens he was basically a non-believer.
After describing his own experience, Hitchens jumps into his project with gusto. The first chapter explains exactly what it means to be an atheist (i.e., someone who lacks a belief in a god; every person reading this is an atheist toward one god or another, e.g., Thor). This chapter is extremely well-written and, as an atheist, I found it to be an accurate portrayal of atheism as I understand it. Unfortunately, this may be one of the strongest chapters in the book.
In the second chapter Hitchens talks about religion-inspired violence around the world. While an old argument, I have to give Hitchens credit for a new approach. Rather than point out the obvious examples of religion-inspired violence (e.g., 9/11, the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack, etc.), he frames this issue in a really intriguing way. He was asked in an interview if he would be comfortable passing a group of religious people coming out of services. His answer, for all religious groups, “No.†Why? Because, as he argues (and there is some evidence to support this; see Mark Juergensmeyer’s 2003 book on religion-inspired terrorism), religion can lead to fanaticism, fundamentalism, and black and white thinking. He has actually been in this situation before and felt uncomfortable. Hitchens, accurately, argues that he does not know of any fanatical secularists who would blow themselves up for their cause. He also makes it clear that this has nothing to do with racial or ethnic minorities, as he has been in a number of situations where he was the racial/ethnic minority and he felt comfortable. He makes a good point in this chapter about religious fanaticism, but I didn’t come away from this chapter feeling like he had won the argument decisively.
The third chapter is a bit odd as it doesn’t really attack religion so much as present one of Hitchens’s pet theories. Hitchens raises the argument that I have heard many times to explain Jewish dietary restrictions surrounding pork: pork, unless cooked very well, is a relatively dangerous meat to eat as it has a high probability of containing trichinosis. Thus, the argument goes, the ban on pork was instituted in Jewish law because it made biological/evolutionary sense to avoid dangerous meats. Hitchens, compellingly I believe, argues that this explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense considering so many other cultural groups ate pork and were just as successful (and many more successful) than Judaism (e.g., Romans). Hitchens argues, instead, that the ban may have resulted from the Jewish recognition that pigs are actually very similar to humans (they aren’t primates, but they are like humans in a lot of other ways; see basically any episode of Mythbusters that involves projectiles). Hitchens proposes that the similarity between humans and pigs led to pigs becoming sacred in a way that is similar to the sacredness of the bread and wine of Christian sacraments – the Christian sacrament is a symbolic gesture of eating one’s god. Eating a pig, Hitchens argues, was like eating a human, which could only be done under special circumstances and when accompanied with substantial ritual. It’s an intriguing argument, I’ll give him that. But I really didn’t see the relevance to religion or atheism. It kept my attention, but that may just be because, as a sociologist, I’m always looking to contextualize behavior.
In chapter four Hitchens returns to his attacks on religion. In this chapter he attacks religion for intervening in health matters. I forget all of the details of his argument (as I’m writing this six months after having read it), but the basic gist was that religious beliefs like those of Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses can interfere with modern medical care and ultimately result in serious harm. If adults want to subject themselves to these situations, I don’t think many people really care. But when adults force their ridiculous beliefs on children, seriously harming or killing them in the process, I believe most people do care. I often raise this issue in my sociology classes when talking about the “inviolate rights†of parents to raise their children how they want – should religious parents be allowed to refuse medical treatments that would save the lives of their children? People are very supportive of parents’ rights and the freedom of religion until faced with this issue… I don’t have an answer, but it’s fun to think about.
Chapter four takes a slightly different approach. Rather than attack religion, Hitchens discusses evolution. He gives a very simplified version of evolution, but his version is clear and accurate (at least, from my perspective as a moderately well-educated non-biologist). The point, of course, is that evolution is a key scientific finding that makes it very easy to dismiss god (I’ve long held that many deists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries would have been atheists if it were not for the issue of creation). Hitchens makes a similar connection between evolution and religion, arguing that it undermines religious belief. There are a lot of people who readily accept that evolution is an accurate theory for understanding speciation but who also believe in a supernatural entity. Believing in evolution doesn’t mean you can’t still believe in a supernatural being (or beings), but it does mean you have to change your understanding of the characteristics of that being – no longer is that being THE CREATOR but rather THE GUIDER, which is a neutered version of traditional and orthodox understandings of god. In short, Hitchens details how just how plausible and attractive atheism becomes in light of evolution and other scientific advances.
Chapters seven and eight continue the attacks on religion, dissecting the Bible and illustrating just how idiotic it really is. Hitchens doesn’t break much new ground here; Thomas Paine tore the Bible to shreds at the end of the 18th century. That said, Hitchens’s arguments are, again, clear and very compelling. I would be interested to hear how a non-dogmatic believer in the Bible responds to these two chapters.
The next chapter (nine, I believe), moves from the Bible to the Quran and basically illustrates that it is not a step up in terms of literary quality or factuality. I really liked this chapter because it tackles an issue that isn’t often raised in Western culture as acceptance of the Quran is not nearly as pervasive as acceptance of the Bible. Hitchens goes into pretty good detail about the history of the Quran and illustrates that it is just as poorly compiled as the Bible (the central characters didn’t write these books – Moses didn’t write the Pentatuech, Jesus didn’t write the Gospels, and Mohammad didn’t write the Quran). Hitchens also points out that the Quran plagiarizes a lot from the Bible and other Arabic writings (which didn’t come as a big shock to me having read a lot of the Quran and having discovered the same is true of the Book of Mormon, which was my primary scriptural resource for the first 25 years of my life). Hitchens also attacks the claimed miracles of Islam, illustrating that they are just as much hot air as the miracles of Christianity.
The discussion of miracles leads Hitchens into his next chapter where he discusses his role in the beatification of Mother Teresa. He was actually brought in by the Catholic Church to play the role of skeptic; he had previously written extensively about how terrible a person Mother Teresa really was (for those who are unfamiliar with this argument, I suggest you read another of Hitchens’s books “The Missionary Position†as it details that she was actually more of a sadist, encouraging suffering and not relieving it). Hitchens easily illustrated that the miracles attributed to her after her death were bunk, but of course the beatification council didn’t listen to reason (not a strong point of religions) and beatified her anyway.
The next chapter roams about in discussing Hitchens’s understanding of the origins of religion (what I call misattributions or the false belief that something unexplainable is the work of supernatural powers). In this discussion he hits on things as far ranging as Polynesian cargo cults (which are remarkable to study), the experience of Marjoe Gortner, a child evangelist who was basically pimped by his parents to make money by fleecing the religious (his 1972 Academy Award winning documentary is a must see), and the LDS religion (which I’ll return to below).
The last third of the book really started to lose my attention. It’s not that it is terribly written, it’s just that Hitchens tries to develop a relatively untenable argument that I didn’t find all that compelling. A classic criticism of atheism, one recently echoed by bigoted and self-interested Pope Benedict XVI, is that it has lead to its own atrocities (e.g., Russian gulags, Chinese torture and imprisonment, etc.). Personally, I don’t think that is the fault of atheism any more than Catholics believe the Holocaust is the fault of Catholicism; the people responsible for these atrocities may have been atheists (i.e., Stalin, Mao, etc.) or may have been Catholics (i.e., Hitler), but I don’t think their religious or irreligious beliefs had anything to do with their actions. Hitler may have used Catholicism to justify his actions, but I don’t believe Catholicism inspired his bigotry toward Jews. And I don’t think Stalin or Mao ever said that the lack of belief in god justified their atrocities. In both cases it was the appeal of power that motivated these individuals and their followers to commit atrocities. I don’t think you can put that on the respective religious/irreligious belief systems.
Now, that’s not to say that religions haven’t been responsible for some atrocities (e.g., the Inquisition and the Crusades are easy examples), but even those atrocities were probably motivated, if not primarily, at least in part, by ulterior motives – power and resources. All the arguments surrounding atrocities and religion really illustrate is that religion is instrumental – it is, as Machiavelli and Marx pointed out hundreds of years ago, a useful tool for those who want power.
So, what is Hitchens’s argument here? Hitchens, wrong-headedly I believe, tries to argue that most communist countries are personality cults (i.e., they worship their dictators). As a result, they are really religions and not atheistic. While there is certainly some truth to the argument that they are personality cults (just look at the pictures of Mao everywhere in China, Stalin and Lenin in the Soviet Union pre-1989, and Castro in Cuba), personality cults aren’t religions. Regardless, this is a very tortured argument. As I pointed out above, all this illustrates is that you can manipulate people using the fundamental elements of religion (i.e., devotion to a higher cause) for your own ends.
Hitchens basically tries the “atheism leads to immorality and violence†criticism by turning it back on religion. Yeah, I can kind of see it, but in the end I don’t think either side is going to win this argument because there isn’t anything to win on this front – both need to admit that elements of religion are regularly used to manipulate followers and empower leaders. If that is an argument against religion, so be it. But I see it more as an argument against blind devotion and willful ignorance.
That basically wraps up what the book covers…
Review:
But there are a few more things I want to mention. First, Hitchens is a great writer. I don’t think anyone can really argue that. His writing is generally very clear and very engaging. And he’s witty. Two witticisms stuck out. Hitchens couldn’t help but mention the Catholic pedophilia scandal, but with a Hitchensonian twist: he calls it “No child’s behind left.” (Yeah, we shouldn’t make fun of it, but it is kind of funny.). Hitchens also skewers Mormonism, which I’m not going to argue with. He does a great job illustrating how preposterous Joseph Smith’s claims are. In the process he makes a point that can only be considered a witticism. Mark Twain called the Book of Mormon “chloroform in print†(chloroform, for those who don’t know, is a chemical that will put you to sleep). Hitchens actually says that Twain wasn’t as witty as people give him credit for – the name “Ether†is actually in the book (it’s the name of one of the alleged contributors). I hate to admit it, but I think Hitchens may have one-upped Twain.
Hitchens is also insightful. He made a few points that I had not heard others make before. For instance, Hitchens says at one point, “Who but a slave thanks his master for telling him what to do without consulting him?†If you think about that for a second, the idea is intriguing. Would you thank someone for telling you what to do without consulting you? Or would you take affront? Hitchens argues that religious people regularly shower their god/s/esses with praise for telling them what to do without consulting them. Basically, they are exhibiting a slavery mindset, which may not be a disorder in the DSM, but probably should be. I have to point out there are two ways of interpreting this, one of which is even more intriguing. The first interpretation is more in line with what Hitchens was saying as religious people often are subjected to the will of others who they believe receive revelations on their behalf (e.g., Catholics, Mormons, and even other less hierarchically structured religions that have pastors who make pronouncements a la Pat Robertson). It is really in this sense that people accept “divine†edicts without having been consulted and do so gratefully. As Bob Altemeyer has argued for years now, this is not healthy (he calls it right-wing authoritarianism and has shown that it is associated with bigotry, dogmaticism, fanaticism, and all sorts of problematic behaviors and beliefs). The second interpretation is more intriguing to me: When it comes to personal “revelation†– when an individual believes he/she is receiving direct revelation from god – their god is, in fact, consulting with them. In a very Durkheimian way, people in that situation are their own god – they are holding a conversation but they are the two participants. I think you can generally see this in personal “revelation†as people generally tend to get the message from their god that they should do what they wanted to before consulting with their god. So, only in the dictatorial sense are people slaves to their gods and religious devotion; in the personal revelation sense, people are slaves to themselves… Trippy, huh?
So, what’s my recommendation? I highly recommend this book, but with a caveat – you don’t have to read the last third. The first two-thirds are insightful, witty, well-written, and compelling and well worth reading. The last third, well, do with it what you will.
(Note: I listened to this book on my iPod.)
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