God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

In "God is Not Great", Christopher Hitchens takes on his biggest subject yet: the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In an acute reading of the world's major religious texts, Hitchens documents the ways in which religion is man made, a cause of dangerous sexual repression and a gross distortion of our origins in the cosmos.

How clever you think this book is depends, largely, on your perspective. In reading other reviews, this has been hailed as the greatest work on the subject of atheism ever written, and also as an act of such grand intellectual trickery it should have its own category in the local bookstore.

One thing everyone can agree on is that it's brilliantly written. Every sentence sparkles with wit and clarity. It's page after page of the smartest, most devastating prose you're likely to encounter. As another reviewer put it "Hitchens has never written a boring sentence in his life."

The subject matter, of course, is the real issue here. Hitchens applies his enormous brain to tearing apart, so the title says, God in all his various forms. In fact, the subtitle is more accurate, as the book is mostly about how awful religion is. God escapes with nothing more than the same roasting given him as far back as Betrand Russell, and in more detail recently by Richard Dawkins. There isn't much new there.

Relgion on the other hand, from Christianity to Islam to Mormonism to Judaism, even Buddhism, gets thoroughly slashed with the Hitchens tongue. It's packed with devastating facts: how about that the Dalai Lama was a big supporter of India's nuclear testing, or that Archbishops in the Catholic Church told their congregations that condoms spread HIV. And it's a powerful, thoroughgoing argument against religion per se.

Hitchens has been criticised by many intellectuals for two things: first, that he spends no energy on looking at why religion is important to people. In simply dismissing it, they argue, he's missing the elephant in the room. Secondly, he is said to imply too strongly that religion causes people to behave cruelly or violently. It does a lot of good too, it is said. Particularly in instilling moral fibre, and entreating people to think beyond their own selfish needs.

For my own part, I think these arguments against Hitchens are weak. And moreover don't dispute many of his most important arguments. Why religion is important is interesting, but a different book. And whether religion sometimes motivates goodness is, I don't think, never disputed by Hitchens. He does however want us to acknowledge the enormous horrors committed in its name. And the likewise good that is done by completely secular organisations. To argue that Stalin and Hitler weren't religious does not negate the fact that Bin Laden, the Ayatollah and the Crusaders were.

This is the most engaging book I've read in a very long time. Whether you're an atheist who wants to hear it said just right, or a believer who is open to debate, this is as close to must-read as its possible to find. An essential companion to living with religion, or in opposition to it.

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