'God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything' by Christopher Hitchens
from JohannHari.com
The legion enemies of Christopher Hitchens have long argued that he has declined into a premature alcoholic senility where he can only belch and flail about incoherently. This dazzling three-hundred page howl against religion will bitterly, brutally disappoint them. It shows Hitchens can still intellectually get it up - and how.
Hitchens has passed through many phases in his political life, from Trotskyite leftist to Wolfowitzian neoconservative, but there has always been a single animating core to his thought: an intense loathing of religion. He is not merely an atheist. He is an anti-theist, convinced that the idea of God has been a disaster for humanity, leading us up a hundred blind-alleys of sexual repression, hallucination and sectarian slaughter. Here, he redefines organised superstition - 'religion' - as humanity's real "original sin".
As with Friedrich Nietzsche's 'The Genealogy of Morals', Hitchens' approach here is primarily historical, tracing the major religions back to their origins and showing how they were plainly fabricated by divinely-uninspired mammals. Why does the 'Virgin' Mary have "no memory of the Archangel Gabriel's visitation, or of the swarms of angels, both telling her she is the mother of god?" he asks. "In all accounts, everything her son does comes to her as a complete surprise. What can he be doing talking to rabbis in the temple?" Why does the 'Prophet' Mohammed receive convenient messages from Allah sanctioning whatever he wants to do, including having sex with a nine-year old child?
The answer, to Hitchens, is obvious, and derived from Ludwig Feuerbach's great insight: God did not create man. Man created god, cobbling him together from a string of half-understood events and rumours. He points out we can actually see how religions are born, live on film. The 1964 documentary 'Mondo Cane' showed the reaction of Pacific Islanders exposed for the first time to Westerners. They concluded that the white interlopers were "their long-mourned ancestors, come back at last with goods from beyond the grave." On the island of Tana, they had a "revelation" that an American GI called John Frum was their redeemer, and to this day, they hold ceremonies proclaiming that the savior Frum will return.
(Continued here.)
The legion enemies of Christopher Hitchens have long argued that he has declined into a premature alcoholic senility where he can only belch and flail about incoherently. This dazzling three-hundred page howl against religion will bitterly, brutally disappoint them. It shows Hitchens can still intellectually get it up - and how.
Hitchens has passed through many phases in his political life, from Trotskyite leftist to Wolfowitzian neoconservative, but there has always been a single animating core to his thought: an intense loathing of religion. He is not merely an atheist. He is an anti-theist, convinced that the idea of God has been a disaster for humanity, leading us up a hundred blind-alleys of sexual repression, hallucination and sectarian slaughter. Here, he redefines organised superstition - 'religion' - as humanity's real "original sin".
As with Friedrich Nietzsche's 'The Genealogy of Morals', Hitchens' approach here is primarily historical, tracing the major religions back to their origins and showing how they were plainly fabricated by divinely-uninspired mammals. Why does the 'Virgin' Mary have "no memory of the Archangel Gabriel's visitation, or of the swarms of angels, both telling her she is the mother of god?" he asks. "In all accounts, everything her son does comes to her as a complete surprise. What can he be doing talking to rabbis in the temple?" Why does the 'Prophet' Mohammed receive convenient messages from Allah sanctioning whatever he wants to do, including having sex with a nine-year old child?
The answer, to Hitchens, is obvious, and derived from Ludwig Feuerbach's great insight: God did not create man. Man created god, cobbling him together from a string of half-understood events and rumours. He points out we can actually see how religions are born, live on film. The 1964 documentary 'Mondo Cane' showed the reaction of Pacific Islanders exposed for the first time to Westerners. They concluded that the white interlopers were "their long-mourned ancestors, come back at last with goods from beyond the grave." On the island of Tana, they had a "revelation" that an American GI called John Frum was their redeemer, and to this day, they hold ceremonies proclaiming that the savior Frum will return.
(Continued here.)
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