BOOK REVIEW: God is not Great (2007)

A very compelling read indeed. One of the great intellectual products of modern times with a critical presentation of the case against the mythologies of religion and god. Hitchens culls the sociological, economic and philosophical implications and underpinning of religion and the belief in god. If anything, the book is an acerbic refutation of the great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, their unholy and historically gruesome role in the subjugation of women, the exploitation of children, and the brainwashing of men for reasons of "god." Hitchens is that writer that minces no words when decrying and refuting the unreason that is religion and how its absurdities have retarded human civilization, bastardized respectable thinking by numbing believers into carrying out reprehensible cruelty engendered by hypocritical religiosity.

In nineteen chapters Hitchens chronicles the rise to power of the three major monotheistic religions of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its rapacious conquests for mind and wealth across the ages, its impossible demands, its brutality, its unholy beliefs and its divinely cloaked murderous brutality. Reading Hitchens is like changing old, worn out clothes for something light, liberating, enlightening and most of all, useful and practical. He quotes Simon Blackburn in echoing the latter's assertion that "religion is a fossilized philosophy," stuck in a rigid, uncompromising, delusional and plainly irrational worldview and according to Blackburn, a "philosophy without logic."

God is not Great is written in plain and easily ascertainable English, in fact, it would be within the grasp of any college educated person, easily within reach of any high schooler but of course, its wide references to a panoply of thinkers over the ages requires, for a better appreciation, a reader who is well-read and well-versed in the liberal arts.

In typical Hitchens fashion, the book ends with a memorable quote which reads: "...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."