Even though The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins was generally panned by critics (not just by Marilynne Robinson, although her dismantling in the pages of Harper’s was certainly one of the most thorough), his book sold quite well. Perhaps riding on the swell of attention Dawkin’s book received, now we have a book of the same stripe by Christopher Hitchens, with the hard-to-ignore title of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. If you got the stab at Muslim creed in the first part, the subtitle is there to make sure you know that all religions will be taken to task, and yes, “everything” does include a historical run-down of religion’s faults and mistakes.
In The Washington Post, Stephen Prothero reviews God is Not Great, and his complaints seem to echo some of the problems critics like Terry Eagleton and Marilynne Robinson had with Richard Dawkins’ book: shoddy logic attempting to explain away secular misdeeds, a vast ignorance of religious belief systems, an arrogant rhetorical stance that demeans rather than reasons, and the inability to separate inauthentic and authentic religious belief systems.
Here’s an excerpt from Prothero’s review:
As should be obvious to any reasonable person — unlike Hitchens I do not exclude believers from this category — horrors and good deeds are performed by believers and non-believers alike. But in Hitchens’s Manichaean world, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Indeed, Hitchens arrives at the conclusion that the secular murderousness of Stalin’s purges wasn’t really secular at all, since, as he quotes George Orwell, “a totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.” And in North Korea today, what has gone awry is not communism but Confucianism.
Just from the excerpts that I’ve read from Hitchen’s book, it seems that the reason I avoid books of this type is the same reason I avoid fundamentalist tracts, talk radio and FOX news. It is the style of arguing that offends me, not the content. The style is one of arguing vehemently, but without balance – unmitigated dogma spilling to the page. If I were to categorize it as a speech act, it would fall somewhere between a rant and a diatribe. I find far too much of that type of discourse to want to subject myself to more of it.
2 comments
I can’t agree more. Militant atheism is as bad as fundamentalism.
Aaarrggh! There is no such thing as militant atheism. You cannot claim, as the reviewer did that fundamental scularism exists because it is not one way of thinking – in fact it is the freedom from dogma. People who are atheists don’t subscribe to one particular belief system – unfortunately, all this opinion shows is your own ignorance and blind subscription to religious norms and inability to think that people are capable of thinking in different ways.