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.
I’m conflicted on the issue of Hitchens. While I agree with his basic critiques of the harm organized religion has done to the planet, he writes in such an incendiary fashion that his book is virtually useless in winning people over to the side of Free Thought. No religious person is going to read his book and feel compelled to question the tenets of their faith; on the contrary, they will feel attacked, insulted, and demonized, much like we atheists often feel in American society.
Don’t get me wrong; I love insulting and making fun of people whom I believe to be stupid and wrong (as if you couldn’t guess that from the tirades on my blog.) But I would say that the Dawkins and Harris books are far more effective as persuasive tools than Hitchens’.
And on a more general note, I lost a lot of respect for Hitchens once he started parroting the “Islamofascists are coming to kill us all!” school of neocon paranoia.
Well, no religious person is going to read his book, period. But the doubting nephew or daughter or son-in-law of a religious person will read his book and be given an armload of new tactics to use the next time they try to convince their religious family member that they aren’t evil for not believing in Jesus/ Muhammad/Buddha.
And yeah, the guy who argued against canonization of Mother Theresa is not the new, cuddly face of atheism today. But until Tom Hanks looses his religion and writes his best selling memoir about it, we have to take what we can get.