I've never read Hitchens before, but I had heard of him: a former Brit, former leftie who went all neo-con after September 11 and roused the ire of his former comrades. With this book the apparent about-turn makes more sense: so incensed is he by militant religion that he was willing to back George and the gang to the hilt. And still does.
Anyhoo, as a born-again atheist it wasn't long before I succumbed and bought the book. While I had misgivings about Richard Dawkins' God Delusion for being occasionally hysterical and often very petty, God is Not Great is unreleteningly on the money. Hitchens is not a scientist like Dawkins, and God is Not Great takes quite a different tack, confronting religion not so much on its veracity, but on its hypocritical immorality. I find this strategy more successful in a way - if Dawkins made you think that faith in the divine was misquided, Hitchens makes you think that it's creepy.
Like Dawkins, Hitchens does vent a lot of spleen, but unlike Dawkins, Hitchens anger is more focussed. As you'd expect, the Catholic church takes a severe beating, but so does Judaism and Islam (subjects Dawkins was more reticent about). Even eastern religion gets a brief but devastating dressing down, by way of an account of how Japanese Zen priests gave their blessing to the Japan's wider Asian imperial project.
The best part about Hitchens' writing is that although he is quite a black and white thinker, he isn't sloppy with it. He sees through the dissemblings of religion quite plainly, and gives a good account of the humanist response. He even dismantles the theist argument that 'Stalin and Hitler were atheists and look at what terrible things they did!' by pointing out that those dictators essentially replaced the church with themselves (doesn't a power complex proclaiming absolute authority and demanding absolute obedience sound kind of familiar?), and that these despots' cynical manipulations of their peoples mirror the same rabble rousing/suppressing techniques employed by the various churches over the centuries.
Hitchens also cuts through (at last!) the fog of cultural relativism that makes the West strangely powerless to assert free speech in the face of Islamic bullying (see the sorry saga of the Danish cartoons).
In short, a triumph. Hitchens isn't afraid to take on idiots in person, either. A friend sent me a link to his eulogy/demolition job on Jerry Falwell on CNN, but the real fireworks came when he later went on Fox News. There was much shit ripped, and indeed Hitchens was moved to comment of Falwell, 'give him an enema and you could bury him in a matchbox'. Nice.
Of course, he must have sold a good many books with those stunts, but you can't help but admire him. Especially when he savages the left as well, as he does in this clip. Clearly an arsehole, but what an arsehole!
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In related news, Jonathan Miller's Atheism: A Short History of Disbelief is available on YouTube. While Miller is all Renaissance Man in his tweed jackets with the arm patches, and the crazy coloured socks, he possibly keeps it a little too about him. Though as I remember it, his Body in Question from the 1970s was much the same, and at least his didactic style does mean you do get educated. Well worth a look.
Posted by stuart at August 26, 2007 8:15 PM