While not as good as The God Delusion, this book is an excellent discussion of why god doesn’t exist, and why the world is better off without religion. It’s an important read that I’d recommend to just about everyone. Note that this book isn’t as well-organized as The God Delusion—Hitchens tends to meander a lot, often into somewhat irrelevant tangents—but the writing can be beautiful and moving, and there are many important insights and takeaways. Here are just a few from my notes:
Religion poisons everything
The God Delusion felt like a systematic, thorough discussion of why god does not exist, and how science and atheism offer alternatives to religion that are better for humanity. God is Not Great treads some of the same ground, but it’s mostly focused on showing how god and religion are terrible for humanity. In other words, the core message of this book is that religion poisons everything. Here are just a handful of the many examples discussed in the book:
- War: endless wars and violence, including all the conflicts in the Middle East.
- Health: turning down modern medicine (e.g., vaccines) in the name of religion.
- Diet: questionable restrictions on what you eat (e.g., pork).
- Sex: mutilating children’s genitalia (male and especially female circumcision); the awful rape scandals of the Catholic church.
To some extent, you can’t really argue with Hitchens’ point. Religion has undoubtedly had an awful impact on many aspects of life. That said, the message felt overly-one sided. Religion has also undoubtedly had some positive impact here and there. You could argue the overall impact was a net negative, but omitting one side entirely weakens the argument.
Religion is full of contradictions, lies, and nonsense
Like every book on religion, this one highlights all the contradictions, lies, and nonsense that is part of every religion. Most religions are so zany that this stuff is easy pickings, so I won’t repeat it here. I’ll only call out a few examples I found especially fun, such as the absurdity of vicarious atonement:
However, the idea of a vicarious atonement, of the sort that so much troubled even C. S. Lewis, is a further refinement of the ancient superstition. Once again we have a father demonstrating love by subjecting a son to death by torture, but this time the father is not trying to impress god. He is god, and he is trying to impress humans.
Ask yourself the question: how moral is the following? I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago, without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life.
Let us just for now overlook all the contradictions between the tellers of the original story and assume that it is basically true. What are the further implications? They are not as reassuring as they look at first sight. For a start, and in order to gain the benefit of this wondrous offer, I have to accept that I am responsible for the flogging and mocking and crucifixion, in which I had no say and no part, and agree that every time I decline this responsibility, or that I sin in word or deed, I am intensifying the agony of it. Furthermore, I am required to believe that the agony was necessary in order to compensate for an earlier crime in which I also had no part, the sin of Adam. It is useless to object that Adam seems to have been created with insatiable discontent and curiosity and then forbidden to slake it all this was settled long before even Jesus himself was born. Thus my own guilt in the matter is deemed “original” and inescapable. However, I am still granted free will with which to reject the offer of vicarious redemption. Should I exercise this choice, however, I face an eternity of torture much more awful than anything endured at Calvary, or anything threatened to those who first heard the Ten Commandments.
The tale is made no easier to follow by the necessary realization that Jesus both wished and needed to die and came to Jerusalem at Passover in order to do so, and that all who took part in his murder were unknowingly doing god’s will, and fulfilling ancient prophecies.
As a second example, consider the absurdity of the argument for “intelligent design,” as per this quote from Michael Shermer:
The anatomy of the human eye, in fact, shows anything but “intelligence” in its design. It is built upside down and backwards, requiring photons of light to travel through the cornea, lens, aquaeous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizontal cells, and bipolar cells before they reach the light-sensitive rods and cones that transduce the light signal into neural impulses—which are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful patterns. For optimal vision, why would an intelligent designer have built an eye upside down and backwards?
Since it’s built on contradictions and lies, religion can only be maintained through an enormous amount of effort:
While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?
Religion doesn’t make you moral
This book covers the topic of whether we get our morals from religion. Hitchens mostly argues against this by showing that religion does not make you moral. He covers numerous examples of immoral activity by deeply religious people, which I won’t repeat here, as they are well-known. I’ll only cover a few stand-out examples. One is how most major religions supported slavery for centuries:
Taking the memorable story of black America as our instance, we should find, first, that the enslaved were not captives of some Pharoah but of several Christian states and societies that for many years operated a triangular “trade” between the west coast of Africa, the eastern seaboard of North America, and the capitals of Europe. This huge and terrible industry was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. (Its counterpart, the slave trade in the Mediterranean and North Africa, was explicitly endorsed by, and carried out in the name of, Islam.) In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine. Thomas Jefferson, ruminating on the way that slavery corrupted and brutalized the masters as well as exploited and tortured the slaves, wrote, “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” This was a statement as incoherent as it is memorable: given the marvel of a god who was also just there would be, in the long term, nothing much to tremble about. At any rate, the Almighty managed to tolerate the situation while several generations were born and died under the lash, and until slavery became less profitable, and even the British Empire began to get rid of it.
Another interesting discussion was what religious people typically bring up as a counterargument: that the most evil regimes in history, Nazism and Communism, were evil because they were atheist. Hitchens takes this argument head-on.
First, he points out that the church thoroughly supported fascism in Italy and Spain, and fascism and Nazism in Germany. Second, many (most?) Germans were Protestant. Third, the Axis powers included Japan, which was a deeply religious society, with the emperor seen as a diety, and head of their religion. So the idea that the evils of WWII were perpetrated solely by atheists is utterly false. Religion played a key part in what happened (to everyone’s shame).
As for Communism, Hitchens’ argument is that they didn’t remove religion, but that it became a religion:
A political scientist or anthropologist would have little difficulty in recognizing what the editors and contributors of The God That Failed put into such immortal secular prose: Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it. The solemn elevation of infallible leaders who were a source of endless bounty and blessing; the permanent search for heretics and schismatics; the mummification of dead leaders as icons and relics; the lurid show trials that elicited incredible confessions by means of torture… none of this was very difficult to interpret in traditional terms. Nor was the hysteria during times of plague and famine, when the authorities unleashed a mad search for any culprit but the real one. (The great Doris Lessing once told me that she left the Communist Party when she discovered that Stalin’s inquisitors had plundered the museums of Russian Orthodoxy and czarism and reemployed the old instruments of torture.) Nor was the ceaseless invocation of a “Radiant Future,” the arrival of which would one day justify all crimes and dissolve all petty doubts.
The example from North Korea is especially striking:
In the early months of this century, I made a visit to North Korea. Here, contained within a hermetic quadrilateral of territory enclosed either by sea or by near-impenetrable frontiers, is a land entirely given over to adulation. Every waking moment of the citizen—the subject—is consecrated to praise of the Supreme Being and his Father. Every schoolroom resounds with it, every film and opera and play is devoted to it, every radio and television transmission is given up to it.
So are all books and magazines and newspaper articles, all sporting events and all workplaces. I used to wonder what it would be like to have to sing everlasting praises, and now I know. Nor is the devil forgotten: the unsleeping evil of outsiders and unbelievers is warded off with a perpetual vigilance, which includes daily moments of ritual in the workplace in which hatred of the “other” is inculcated. The North Korean state was born at about the same time as Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and one could almost believe the holy father of the state, Kim Il Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he could make it work in practice. Yet even Orwell did not dare to have it said that “Big Brother’s” birth was attended by miraculous signs and portents—such as birds hailing the glorious event by singing in human words. Nor did the Inner Party of Airstrip One/Oceania spend billions of scarce dollars, at a time of horrific famine, to prove that the ludicrous mammal Kim Il Sung and his pathetic mammal son, Kim Jong Il, were two incarnations of the same person. (In this version of the Arian heresy so much condemned by Athanasius, North Korea is unique in having a dead man as head of state: Kim long ll is the head of the party and the army but the presidency is held in perpetuity by his deceased father, which makes the country a necrocracy or mausolocracy as well as a regime that is only one figure short ofa Trinity.) The afterlife is not mentioned in North Korea, because the idea of a defection in any direction is very strongly discouraged, but as against that it is not claimed that the two Kims will continue to dominate you after you are dead. Students of the subject can easily see that what we have in North Korea is not so much an extreme fom of Communism—the term is hardly mentioned amid the storms of ecstatic dedication—as a debased yet refined form of Confucianism and ancestor worship.
Finally, Hitchens also points out how many evil regimes there have been that were religious: e.g., Apartheid in South Africa, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Shah of Iran, the Taliban, the Spanish Inquisition, and so on.
All of these are compelling and interesting arguments. I think the biggest miss is that there isn’t enough discussion about how no one gets their morals from religion—not even religious people. For example, the Bible includes countless moral lessons that no modern person follows, which means both theists and atheists pick their morals based on something that isn’t scripture. The God Delusion has a deeper discussion on this very topic.
We’ve seen modern religions form, and we know they are frauds
One particularly striking part of the book was the discussion of modern religions and how we have incontrovertible proof they are fraudulent, but people keep on believing anyway. For example, most people have heard of cargo cults, and can chuckle at the “naïveté” of the islanders. You’ve probably also heard of Mormonism, which has around 17 million believers, even though it was started by Joseph Smith, who was a known, convicted, and admitted conman, and it is painfully clear that the Book of Mormon he “discovered” was just another one of his cons. And you’ve probably also seen some of the evangelical preachers in megachurches and on TV, but if you watch the movie Marjoe, you’ll see one of these preachers revealing the exact tactics he uses to manipulate people, and just how much fraud is involved.
The point is not that these three particular religions are fraudulent; it’s that if you could see the formation of any religion, you’d realize that all religions are fraudulent. You should chuckle just as much at the “naïveté” of Christians, Muslims, and Jews, as of cargo cult worshippers. The only reason you don’t is that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism were formed so long ago, we don’t have as much of a record to show how fraudulent it all was.
Our understanding of the world has advanced to where we don’t need religion
Another particularly strong part of the book is the idea that religion was created at a time when most humans were incredibly ignorant:
Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think—though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.
Today, our understanding of the world has advanced to the point where we don’t need religion, as in this beautiful anecdote about Laplace:
Laplace (1749-1827) was the brilliant French scientist who took the work of Newton a stage further and showed by means of mathematical calculus how the operations of the solar system were those of bodies revolving systematically in a vacuum. When he later turned his attention to the stars and the nebulae, he postulated the idea of gravitational collapse and implosion, or what we now breezily term the “black hole.” In a five-volume book entitled Celestial Mechanics he laid all this out, and like many men of his time was also intrigued by the orrery, a working model of the solar system as seen, for the first time, from the outside. These are now commonplace but were then revolutionary, and the emperor asked to meet Laplace in order to be given either a set of the books or (accounts differ) a version of the orrery. I personally suspect that the gravedigger of the French Revolution wanted the toy rather than the volumes: he was a man in a hurry and had managed to get the church to baptize his dictatorship with a crown. At any event, and in his childish and demanding and imperious fashion, he wanted to know why the figure of god did not appear in Laplace’s mind-expanding calculations. And there came the cool, lofty, and considered response. “Je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse.” Laplace was to become a marquis and could perhaps more modestly have said, “It works well enough without that idea, Your Majesty.” But he simply stated that he didn’t need it.
And neither do we.
We don’t know everything, of course, and we never will. But we understand far more than we used to, and when we don’t understand it, we’re not afraid to say so. This is the opposite of religion, which arrogantly claims to know and explain everything:
Thus the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the “meaning” of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet—the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what “he” demands of us from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude “belief” from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.
We no longer need this attitude. We no longer need to delude ourselves and dwell in our ignorance. Every new discovery causes religion to fade away:
The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. A modern believer can say and even believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion’s monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason. What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs and surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes.
We have better alternatives to religion
Literature beats scripture for ethics:
We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul.
Science beats scripture for wonder:
Not all can be agreed on matters of aesthetics, but we secular humanists and atheists and agnostics do not wish to deprive humanity of its wonders or consolations. Not in the least. If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful—and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding—than any creation or “end of days” story. If you read Hawking on the “event horizon,” that theoretical lip of the “black hole” over which one could in theory plunge and see the past and the future (except that one would, regrettably and by definition, not have enough “time”), I shall be surprised if you can still go on gaping at Moses and his unimpressive “burning bush.”
