God is Not Great

Now that I've come out of the atheist closet so to speak (at least, on this blog), I feel it's alright to talk about one of the two atheist books I've read this past year: God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. The basic premise of this book is well-summarized in its subtitle: "How Religion Poisons Everything." Unfortunately, Hitchens wrote the book as if it were a collection of articles on different subjects, and as such, he never really gets down to the heart of his premise.

Now, although I started this book months ago and it's not all that long, I only recently finished it, largely due to Hitchens' writing style. See, Hitchens is the kind of guy who, although really smart, throws around his intelligence with little regard for who his reader may be. For instance, in a single paragraph it's not all that uncommon for him to mention several different complex ideas, whether it be in the form of the work of an author, the history of a group of people, a philosophical perspective, or an obscure scientific reference, referring to each only by their name, assuming the reader knows everything he's talking about. Therefore, while he might often have really profound points, they're often lost on even readers who generally know about these sorts of things (but maybe not all of them).

This caveat aside (and it is a big one), I did glean a few great insights from Hitchens' book, but overall they were so overwhelmed by the inside references that I walked away not liking the book all that much. Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion (which I read a while ago but didn't write about due to the subject matter), on the other hand, was written in a communicative style with an eye towards educating, not preaching to the choir, and as such, it reads really well.

The next book of this sort I might check out is Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, but right now I'm reading a college philosophy textbook to help raise my awareness of different philosophical perspectives, perhaps to aid in reading my next Hitchens book... =)