Book Review: God Is Not Great . . . Is Not Great

I saw a Newsweek review recently on the book God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I was interested in seeing what a reasoned argument against Christianity and religion in general would have to say so I went to Border's and perused the book. I'm still looking for such an argument. The book is dripping with such arrogance that it is exhausting to try to trudge through, and his arguments have holes in them you could drive a truck through. In Hitchens' black-and-white perspective, secularists can do no evil and religious people can do nothing right. If you want to argue that religious people have done some pretty awful things, I would agree and you have some credibility, but you are also going to need to admit your own mistakes and he showed no willingness to do so. I didn't end up buying the book, not because I was afraid it might convince me but because it was so poorly written it wasn't worth the money. Maybe I'll get it from the library. The Washington Post review by Stephen Prothero listed on the amazon.com site sums it up pretty well.

"Hitchens describes the religious mind as "literal and limited" and the atheistic mind as "ironic and inquiring." Readers with any sense of irony -- and here I do not exclude believers -- will be surprised to see how little inquiring Hitchens has done and how limited and literal is his own ill-prepared reduction of religion. Christopher Hitchens is a brilliant man, and there is no living journalist I more enjoy reading. But I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject."