The Invisible Library

I don’t often agree with Christopher Hitchens. His midlife flight from Trotskyism has, in many ways, turned him into a cranky reactionary, siding with Neocons when occasion suits him and generally being contrarian for the sake of pissing people off. Which is fine, the world needs it’s contrarians and I don’t have to agree with a man entirely to recognize when he is making sense. Which is why I’m glad he put the gin bottle down long enough to write God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Firstly, you probably won’t discover too many new pieces of information here, though I did learn a few things about how the Koran was edited together that were new to me. But Hitchen’s offers a much needed complementary view to atheism in general and Atheist writing in particular. The unavoidable comparisons to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are made in just about every review of Hitchens’ book I’ve read and they probably will form a sort of unofficial atheist trilogy. Where Harris comes at the problem of faith and belief in god form the point of view of a philosopher and Dawkins tackles it from the perspective of a scientist, Hitchens offers us the much needed insight of a journalist and man of letters.

It’s this literary perspective that is most necessary to help encourage skepticism and disbelief to spread among the general public. Far too often, atheists are seen as cold, calculating rationalists, robot men who have amputated the limb of faith and are lacking in something vital, all in the pursuit of reason. Hitchens does a service in showing that disbelief is not the result of prolonged exposure to rare intellectual isotopes but the natural and organic process of simply living in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Atheism and skepticism has a long and glorious tradition, rooted in Enlightenment values of free thought, unrestrained inquiry and above all imagination. Some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the last three centuries have been men and women without faith. These are not freaks and outsiders, hammering away at the foundation of Western Civilization. They are they architects of our culture. Showing that the Bible is just shoddy literature, with very human (and often bloody) fingerprints all over it will go a long way towards undermining its authority as an unimpeachable resource, one to be eyed with the critics skeptic eye than the true believer’s blind faith.