Viewer's review: God Is Not Great

God Is Not Great
Christopher Hitchens
ISBN-13: 978-1843545743
 
 A book I recently enjoyed was ‘God Is Not Great’ by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is the best-selling author of many books ranging from critiques of Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa to admirable, favourable compositions of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. To anyone familiar with Hitchens’ work, ‘God Is Not Great’ has been a work in progress all his writing life, various excerpts and arguments have frequented many of his previous works.

The book itself is a scathing criticism of monotheism and the religious dogmatism and bigotry that adhere to such beliefs. Hitchens not only argues that the proof for the existence of God is extraordinarily minute, but that if it were true it would be deplorable and undesirable, classing himself as an anti-theist, not an atheist. The wish for it is the want to be servile and menial. The book is both a historical account of the three monotheisms and acts as a philosophical concept for those opposing religion. It wouldn’t be Hitchens without his innate wittiness, his comparison that living under the watchful eye of a theocratic ‘dictator‘ would be like living in a ‘celestial North Korea’ is fantastically clever.

Anyone who reads this and is not left questioning or debating their beliefs has either not read it properly or possesses the same religious dogmatism that Hitchens so brilliantly criticises. The argument he makes is informative, thoroughly researched and eloquently purposed. On the contrary, the religious argument is the classic reductio ad absurdum, it lacks probability, plausibility and crucial of all…evidence.

By Stephen O Rourke, Ireland

Stephen has also enjoyed reading Liberal Fascism by Johan Goldberg and Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali