I haven't discussed my religion on this blog before, and I will not do so now - I blog about economics and politics and business, and those are contentious enough for me. Last year (2007), Christopher Hitchens, journalist and author, wrote a book called god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It's a book similar to scientist Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.
Hitchens does not just believe that religion is wrong, as is obvious from the subtitle. He believes it to be downright dangerous:
I, as most of us, have known pious people whose religion preaches tolerance and love who are the least tolerant and loving people you'll ever find, and use their religion to justify their intolerance. I've also known other people whose faith informed their lives in giving and caring ways; Hitchens would say that those people could be moral without their religion, and he's right - but would they?
Sometimes faith is a matter of indoctrination, even of personal weakness. At other times, it provides a complement to life, enriching and enhancing it. You can argue whether or not it is man-made or God-granted, but, like it or not, faith's interaction with the individual is likely to be idiosyncratic, and blanket statements like "it poisons everything" are unlikely either to convince or inform.
Hitchens has not written a bad book, at least, not in the purely literary sense. It is impassioned, but also reasoned, and certainly makes one think that religious leaders have more to answer for than they have embraced. Religion, like any complex institution made up of people, can spend more time trying to maintain its sense of infallibility than it does in trying to accommodate a changing world, and that generally works out poorly.
So read this book with an open mind; if you lean toward having faith in religion, your basic tenets will likely not be challenged, but it may allow you to ask questions of the people who represent you and your deity. If you lean toward a lack of faith, the book may well reinforce your doubts (or disbelief). Either way, it will make you think about the role religion plays in the modern world, and that's a worthwhile exercise.
Hitchens does not just believe that religion is wrong, as is obvious from the subtitle. He believes it to be downright dangerous:
If I cannot definitively prove that the usefulness of religion is in the past, and that its foundational books are transparent fables, and that it is a man-made imposition, and that it has been an enemy of science and inquiry, and that it has subsisted largely on lies and fears, and has been the accomplice of ignorance and guilt as well as of slavery, genocide, racism, and tyranny, I can most certainly claim that religion is now fully aware of these criticisms.Actually, he does feel he's proven all those things. This book is, at base, a contrast of religion to civilization, with religion as the expression of backward, primitive thinking, doomed to be in eternal conflict with the humanizing forces of civilization.
I, as most of us, have known pious people whose religion preaches tolerance and love who are the least tolerant and loving people you'll ever find, and use their religion to justify their intolerance. I've also known other people whose faith informed their lives in giving and caring ways; Hitchens would say that those people could be moral without their religion, and he's right - but would they?
Sometimes faith is a matter of indoctrination, even of personal weakness. At other times, it provides a complement to life, enriching and enhancing it. You can argue whether or not it is man-made or God-granted, but, like it or not, faith's interaction with the individual is likely to be idiosyncratic, and blanket statements like "it poisons everything" are unlikely either to convince or inform.
Hitchens has not written a bad book, at least, not in the purely literary sense. It is impassioned, but also reasoned, and certainly makes one think that religious leaders have more to answer for than they have embraced. Religion, like any complex institution made up of people, can spend more time trying to maintain its sense of infallibility than it does in trying to accommodate a changing world, and that generally works out poorly.
So read this book with an open mind; if you lean toward having faith in religion, your basic tenets will likely not be challenged, but it may allow you to ask questions of the people who represent you and your deity. If you lean toward a lack of faith, the book may well reinforce your doubts (or disbelief). Either way, it will make you think about the role religion plays in the modern world, and that's a worthwhile exercise.
1 comment:
At its worst, religion is poisonous; at its best, charitable. But what's the ratio? 98/2?
- scott
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