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    God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
    Unavailable
    God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
    Unavailable
    God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
    Audiobook8 hours

    God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

    Published by Hachette Audio

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Whether you're a lifelong believer, a devout atheist, or someone who remains uncertain about the role of religion in our lives, this insightful manifesto will engage you with its provocative ideas.

    With a close and studied reading of the major religious texts, Christopher Hitchens documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

    In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateMay 1, 2007
    ISBN9781600240102
    Unavailable
    God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

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    Reviews for God Is Not Great

    4/5

    2,009 ratings118 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Arguments presented for the humanist case, the need to confront our comfortable consensus that religious beliefs should be respected, a respect that sometimes rubs up against legal rights of the individual.
    • 4/5
      As usual, Hitchens satisfies with a snappy writing style, at times eloquent and passionate, at other times sneering. Some of his arguments fall flat, and sometimes he lets a few of his political views interfere with his main thesis, but overall, it's a satisfying read for anyone who is fighting against the more poisonous aspects of public religion.
    • 5/5
      Sharp, witty and extremely well-thought out arguments against the institution of religion, belief and faith.
    • 3/5
      Highly enjoyable polemic on religions.
    • 5/5
      Christopher Hitchens's 'God is not Great' is an interesting collection of well thought out arguments for why religions are harmful to humanity. In his work, Hitchens examines the thinking behind the many doctrines of several religions and exposes the fraudulent nature of many preachers. He eloquently takes down religious apologetics and dogmas, thoughtfully articulating with persuasive rhetoric why religious claims are not to be believed. I highly recommend 'God is not Great' for anyone who wants to take a critical look at religious doctrines.
    • 4/5
      Well writ and well argued, if somewhat... misdirected? "Preaching to the choir" is perhaps an ironic idiom to choose, but nevertheless this is a prevailing feeling on my part.
    • 4/5
      A point well argued; a bit meandering at times.
    • 4/5
      Very important book written for those of us who have an open mind and are willing to use reason above faith. It took great courage for Hitchens to publish this, and hat's off to him. Glad to have somebody at least attempt to be straightforward and honest about a topic that has long concerned me.
    • 4/5
      Brilliant. Loved his fiesty and acerbic writing style. Specifically enjoyed the chapter on religion as child abuse, his assertation that Christianity has never even managed to develop a desirable concept of heaven, and his general exposure of the amount of effort truly required, politically and theologically, to assert the existence of the non-existent.

      The mention of more dates would have been good, however I have a feeling he avoided using them so that the book did not read like a textbook. Unfortunately I really missed them. Found the overwhelming amount of political detail sometimes caused me to struggle, but his arguments are sound and makes some incredibly well delivered points.

    • 3/5
      Hey, guess what! There's no god, but more importantly religion is a silly superstition and quite harmful.

      Maybe I should have posted the above in spoiler tags because that pretty much sums up the book. I am guessing this book isn't going to change many people's minds, but I do imagine that it will speak those sitting somewhere on the fence between belief and non-belief, while reinforcing a non-believers non-belief.

      Hitchens, in his usual style has some pretty good (or jerk-ish) barbs. This one being my favorite:

      ln 2004, a soap-opera film about the death of Jesus was produced by an Australian fascist and ham actor named Mel Gibson. Mr. Gibson adheres to a crackpot and schismatic Catholic sect consisting mainly of himself and of his even more thuggish father, and has stated that it is a pity that his own dear wife is going to hell because she does not accept the correct sacraments.

      I thought I was done with books critical of belief. After all, I've got my principals and no real evidence has been presented/discovered to sway me towards belief. However, I wanted to listen to Hitchens read one of his books, but wasn't prepared to listen to him read Hitch-22 for 20 hours.

      This fit the bill, and now I can move right along to something less polemical.
    • 5/5
      Six-word review:Where religion's not destructive, it's irrelevant.
    • 4/5
      I've been reading this book on the treadmill. It's really quite an interesting companion to The God Delusion, although at times his arguments seem based upon personal experience. At his best, he's dissecting the Bible and other religion books for the illogical time lines and such.
    • 5/5
      Mr Hitchens takes us on a deep-dive of the ill-effects of religion/god in all the sections of this book. I really enjoyed his argument style and it kept me going on-and-on.Chapter 13: Does Religion Make People Behave BetterChapter 16: Is Religion Child Abuse?Chapter 19: In Conclusion: The Need for a New Enlightenmentare sections you don't want to miss.Chapter 9: The Koran Is Borrowed from Both Jewish and Christian Myths was an eye-opener. The extent of research done by the author is evident in the pages of valuable information in the book."People are always free to make up a religion that suits or gratifies or flatters them." - how absolutely true!Although I've rated this book as a 5-stars, I feel that Dr. Dawkins makes better 'hit right on the nail' kinda points! - The God Delusion
    • 5/5
      If you love Hitch, don't miss this withering take on religious belief and its institutions. As criticism goes, God Is Not Great is scathing and unforgiving. But since we're talking about Christopher Hitchens here, it's just another day at the office for him.
    • 4/5
      With a title like "God is not great", you don't start reading expecting a nuanced look at religion. And with an author like the late Christopher Hitchens, you don't expect anything less than a thorough damnation of whatever he turns his mind to.Hitchens describes his own religious journey to atheism and then raises ideas like 'Is Religion Child Abuse' (yes) and 'The Nightmare of the "Old" Testament' (although I think that most people would agree many parts of the Old Testament are NSFW). He doesn't pull any punches in his attacks on religion and I can't help but think that he isn't going to win any new converts, and is just preaching to the converted. Still, Hitchens could put a sentence together like few others and he's in top form here. So for an old fence sitting agnostic like myself it was an interesting diversion for me while holidaying in Monaco recently.
    • 5/5
      I have the audio version of this as well (because Christopher Hitchens lends his own voice to it, and why wouldn't he?), and it's my favorite book of its kind. It delves into specific religions, especially the ones more familiar to Western readers, but also to the idea of religion in and of itself. As always, I learned something from it that I hadn't before. If anything, it helped me understand myself as a person and my own beliefs.
    • 4/5
      This book feels like it's at odds with itself. Its author seems to have both great respect for religion and yet utter disdain and even disgust for it. I suppose that's part of the trouble of living in a world whose history and culture are so thoroughly saturated with it. On the one hand, people do truly terrible things in the name of religion - any religion - but on the other, it's such a huge part of humankind, for better or worse. If you read this, prepared to be horrified, but also edified, mystified, and even occasionally amused. Definitely worth reading by people of faith, if only to hear a few new arguments from the "other side". I don't think it'll convince anyone either way, but I definitely learned a lot of new things.
    • 4/5
      Hitchens is Dawkins like more mature, more eloquent brother. He writes very knowledgeably about religion, its shameful history and how it lessens believers and atheists alike. I'd recommend it to everyone; it is densely-packed and heavy-going and is probably worth rereading.
    • 4/5
      God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I'm reviewing this book as an evangelical Christian. I have long wanted to read a Hitchens book after enjoying many of his witty book reviews in The Atlantic and seeing the respect other evangelicals had for Hitchens after engaging him personally. As he wrote in his book, he spent much of his time among Christian or religious friends. He is a character.


      Epistomological humility is the main lesson I gleaned from this book. Most of my Christian friends (myself included) are very confident in their theological positions and all of them, whether they admit it or not, look slightly down their nose at other positions as "errant" and therefore inferior. But this is arrogance. To think that of all the billions of people who have existed on earth, I was not only chosen by God and ended up in the one True religion, but have also ended up in precisely the right branch of Christianity. Not only that, but my specific school of thought within that branch contains the most right interpretation of Scripture written in other languages and cultures that existed thousands of years ago. That my team is the "most right" that ever existed. What are the odds of this? Incalculable. Yet, that's what most of us believe. So, maybe we should all be more humble. I would do better to admit as Baptist theologian/pastor Rodney Reeves does that I'm Baptist just because I was raised Baptist.


      I enjoyed Hitchens' critique of the various religions. Very few have the breadth of knowledge and experience of travel, marriage, working, and friendships in so many religions and culture. Hitchens is like the anti-C.S. Lewis, well-steeped in world literature and philosophy but coming down on the opposite side of Lewis' "Lord, liar, or lunatic" proposition-- which Hitchens praises Lewis for.

      A couple of weaknesses I found in Hitchens' arguments:

      Hitchens repeatedly lauds the moral position and behavior of himself and other atheists/humanists. He repeatedly criticizes religions for promoting "evil" deeds such as murder, genocide, slavery, etc. This requires that morality exists and can be defined--that all is not relative. But Christianity justifies its moral code on the basic idea that man was created in God's image. This is the reason given in Genesis for murder being criminal. Without God, and an absolute truth, what basis does Hitchens or other atheists give for criticizing the behavior of others? Acknowledging and defining "evil" is a real philosophical problem for atheists, and Hitchens avoids that weakness completely.

      Hitchens gives a good summary of arguments against Michael Behe's theory of irreducible complexity. He gives new scientific evidence and theory explaining the evolution of the eye, for example. He points out that we have plenty of useless body parts, and asks why an intelligent designer would design an eye that would require that images taken in be flipped before processed by the brain. That the body is a fairly inefficient system that if we could start from scratch and design ourselves we could make more efficient. My critique:
      How did the first organism know that there was light to see and "data" to be received from it? Where did the light come from, and the data embedded in it? How did it know that the "data" could be decoded and made useful via something called "nerves"? He does critique the "have you ever seen a car without a maker?" argument and other more simple ones that Christians frequently use. But he does not explain a first cause. Stephen Hawking, in his essays published in Black Holes and Baby Universes, states that the universe's origins are explained by either a Grand Unifying Theory of physics, or a creator God. Hawking is betting on the GUT. Hitchens does not acknowledge that tradeoff, even though he quotes Hawking.

      Hitchens does not believe in a literal resurrection because he is uncertain that a Jesus ever existed. He doesn't address the radically changed behavior of Jesus' followers after the resurrection event, or their peculiar martyrdoms. Many biblical critics, including those in the Jesus Seminar, acknowledge that "something happened" around the time of Jesus' supposed resurrection that is hard to explain with any physical or scientific explanations. Hitchens does not address those concerns, seemingly lumping in Christian martyrdom as the same as those seen in Islam, Mormonism, or other religions.

      I enjoyed Hitchens' critiques of Mormonism and Islam, showing them as essentially the flip sides of the same coin (which I have often argued). He does a great job showing the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the Catholic Church when it comes to moral posturing.He points out an awful lot in the history of all the religions that adherents would rather forget.

      In an interview I saw with Hitchens late in his life (I believe it was on 60 Minutes) he stated that he did not deny the chance that a God may be out there, he was just supremely confident that none of the religions and explanations for him here on earth were correct. It's important to keep that statement in mind while reading this book.

      If you want a more complete rebuttal to Hitchens et al, I would recommend William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith, which at one time included a 13-cassette audio series that I listened to in college and gleaned quite a bit from.

      I recommend Hitchens book for though-provoking discussion and even entertainment value. I would argue that every Christian should read this book and be ready to give a response to it. I give it 4 stars out of 5.
    • 2/5
      Having read the book some time before the author died and having written a review but not on this site I'm at a loss to comprehend now what went wrong with this book. I had a more lenient rating system at the time I read this book. Now I'd have given this book a 2/5 - which I just have. There is too much focus on current terrorist acts and while in theory it's not a bad idea, I did found such parts muddling and boring. Respect to Hitchens though and RIP.
    • 4/5
      Hitchens is smart and witty--and he is taking on one of the most controversial issues: Religion.

      Hitchen's point is simple: religion is bad, it makes people do bad things. There are people who do good things in the name of religion, but he also asks: What great thing could a person do that he could not do without religion? (Is religion needed to make humans good? Hitchens would say, judging by all of the terrible things that people have done in the name of religion...no.)

      This was a fascinating (and pretty quick) read. While reading this book I thought to myself, "I wish I could teach my students to write like this." Every sentence and every word is carefully chosen to support his anti-religious point of view. He writes this book very well.

      Whether or not you believe in what he is saying, this is a great book to learn the power of effective arguments!
    • 4/5
      Hitchens had a way of explaining the world of lies that is religion that not only makes sense but also makes you wonder how is it not obvious to everybody. In this book he tackles all the common aspects of a deity figure (concentraiting mostly on the ones of the popular religions) and makes a very good case of all the failures, inconsistencies and plain silliness that would be needed for any of those figures to be real.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely reinforcing my observations throughout all my life of this feeling that religion does poison everything. This book/Audiobook is absolutely excellent read and I love it. Christopher’s discussion isn’t about gods but rather about religions or Places of Worship, and how through crass stupidity and self interest, they are destructively hypocritical. This is recommended.
    • 5/5
      Everyone should examine their beliefs and see if they need them. This gives an overview of many religions and their many crimes
    • 3/5
      Mr. Hitchens is both a very bright and very bitter man. He has penned a very intellectual debunking of religion and made a thorough case for atheism. While I didn't disagree with him on many of his points, he seems to take a bit too much joy in his task, which subtracted from my overall enjoyment. That being said, when spending as much time researching the evils of religion as this man has, it would be hard to come away without a modicum of fury. Excellent reading for those looking to read a solid counter-point to the argument for religion and well worth the time.
    • 5/5
      Every but as great as I expected, if not more so.
    • 5/5
      Nobody who reads this, and truly understands the content, can ever give an honest profession of faith in any man made religion. Hitchens nails exactly why and how religion poisons everything.
    • 5/5
      A must read for anyone interested in the subject of religion!
    • 1/5
      The title says it all, a subiective assetion that represents the true poison of soul a mind
    • 5/5
      The official "Bible" for atheists. Agree or disagree with Hitchens, it's a pleasure to listen to his superb English.