Book Review: god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens

I just finished reading Christopher Hitchens' "god is not Great" subtitled "How Religion poisons everything" and I have to say, it is nothing if not thorough. Hitchens gives some first person, eyewitness accounts of religious insanities he has observed in his many travels which flesh out his argument quite nicely. This is not to say that his argument is a skeletal structure by any means. He gives an overwhelming avalanche of examples to make his case from our common Human history; but his own anecdotal incidents of evidence grab you viscerally as they echo the very horrors that can be read most recently in the news coming out of the Middle East and Africa. Because he gives you the up close and personal POV of these events, you really get the visual....and inescapable emotional response. Hitchens really does articulate brilliantly and paints a vivid picture in the telling.

When I was a child in church (Catholic) and heard the story of God telling Abraham he needed to murder his son Isaac in order to prove his love and loyalty, I recoiled from this "loving Father". Although I tried, I really did, to wrap my mind around this being the request of the supposed Creator of us all, even as a little girl I couldn't make sense of it. Ditto the story about Adam and Eve eating a fruit and God being so angry as to tell Eve that, not only would SHE be booted out of Eden and have to have pain in childbirth, but EVERYONE else ever to be born had this coming to them AND not only that, but they had the stain of "Original Sin' on them. God wasn't just mad at Eve, but mad at all women to come, forever. And ever. Now I knew my parents to be loving people, yet they were strict and punishment was part of their parental repertoire. If I was naughty, I might get a spanking during the heat of their anger; yet their anger cooled AND they wouldn't dream of spanking my brother as well, for something I'D done. Yet here was, God, the Being represented to us children in Catechism as an infinitely loving Father, being angry and desiring to punish EVERYBODY for what Adam and Eve did, from the beginning of Time onward. If God was such an Omnipotently loving Being how could he be meaner and more vengeful than my ordinary, humanly loving parents? I could never square this peg into a round hole.

When we got to the New Testament and learned about Jesus, the disconnect between logic, evidence and doctrine continued. Once again, here was God being represented as a loving Father, whose love knew no bounds apparently, because he decided that in order to stop being angry at all of us human children, he would send to Earth a perfect human being, (who was in essence part of himself we were told) and THAT person, if tortured and crucified (even though, he'd done nothing wrong and was exempt from the charge of Original sin) would "pay" for our sins. This was represented as a bargain for us. Well, even as a child, I thought this was outrageous! IF God was Omnipotent, as was said, WHY oh WHY did he simply not find it in his (infinitely) loving heart to simply forgive us? Why was this excruciating, horrifying murder necessary to appease him? My puny human parents forgave me on a regular basis for naughtiness which I engaged in purposely, yet God couldn't forgive humanity for being born AFTER Adam and Eve ate a fruit?

In a nutshell, what I was asked to buy was that God was an all-Loving Father who cared for his children beyond anything a human parent could ever do; and that he was our TRUE Father after all, yet he required that blood be spilled in order to be quit of his anger. Additonally, if we continued to be naughty children on occasion and should we die at some point without benefit of a (very) recent confession and penance we would go, not to our "rooms" or miss a celestial supper or two in Heaven, no we would be damned to go to Hell, where we would be tortured by burning in fire FOREVER....and EVER. There was NO possibility of parole, no possibility of appeals for Mercy, no possibilites or alternatives, period. I will tell you that my little child heart rebelled mightily at this notion, it seemed so overwhelmingly unjust and yet, just the opposite was told to us: that God was a just and merciful God. We were told that our duty was to love God with our whole heart and whole soul. I could never do it, I never would do it and when told that God's ways were "mysterious" it never satisfied my intellect OR heart; I never could buy what they were selling and later I would realize that this behavior wasn't "mysterious" but something quite different. It starts with a "psych" and ends with an "otic".

Well, Hitchens' book definitely outlines every major and minor inconsistency in the religious tales we've been told; in the cosmologies and ontologies. Beyond demonstrating, most convincingly, that "god" sprang out of the anthropomorphic imagination of a wandering desert tribe in the Iron Age, he provides scientific evidence which belies the claims of the Bible and Koran with respect to the creation myths. This is to be expected in a book of this nature, and Hitchens leaves no stone unturned here, but he also does his job with wit, irony and a writing style that brings not a few smiles and for me, a few instances of great belly laughs. There are also instances of heavy sadness; one can't help but be moved.

Overall, for people who've questioned or are questioning the veracity and usefulness of the old time religion in this day and age, Hitchens book will be edifying and elucidating. For those of you who've already jumped ship, this book will STILL provide much history and information to further educate and inform and in a way that may have you feeling that you've had a most enjoyable read. Even if there is a sense that Hitchens' may be preaching to the choir, (pardon the irony in that phrase), it will leave you with the hope that this "choir" is one that will grow in light of the facts. If we are to put an end to the current atrocities that are occuring in "god's" or "allah's" name, humanity WILL have to come out of the Iron Age and into a new Enlightenment. After reading Hitchen's book, you may feel that it can't come soon enough.