Audio Book: God Is Not Great

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens (Author)

Although I'm a libertarian at heart, and I do believe in some higher power, this audio book opens up a new paradigm, when it comes to the "classical" way we think about religion. If your up for a very interesting argument for why there may be no god (divine creation), then gives this a listen. Warning: It's hard to get your head around this (for me anyways), but Christopher Hitchens is a living maverick when it comes to today's intellectuals. I find him very entertaining regardless. It should make those barstool conversations a little more interesting with your friends. I know this post is not ROCKNROLL, but anyone who can stretch the mind like an elastic band is okay by me. - wino

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Hitchens, one of our great political pugilists, delivers the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. The same contrarian spirit that makes him delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has God placed in the dock. And can he turn a phrase!: "monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents." Hitchens's one-liners bear the marks of considerable sparring practice with believers. Yet few believers will recognize themselves as Hitchens associates all of them for all time with the worst of history's theocratic and inquisitional moments. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling believers' weaker arguments: that faith offers comfort (false comfort is none at all), or has provided a historical hedge against fascism (it mostly hasn't), or that "Eastern" religions are better (nope). The book's real strength is Hitchens's on-the-ground glimpses of religion's worst face in various war zones and isolated despotic regimes. But its weakness is its almost fanatical insistence that religion poisons "everything," which tips over into barely disguised misanthropy.


GOD