The chapters in Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great are not getting ver substantive and so I will deal with a number at the same time. These four chapters, “The Koran is Borrowed,” “Tawdriness of the Miraculous,” “Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings,” and “How Religions End” all have something in common: religious examples that should be embarrassing.
I was a little surprised at Hitchens’ chapter on Islam. Considering the current anti-Muslim sentiment in much of the West, Hitchens was not near as mocking as he is of many religions, including Christianity. Don’t get me wrong, he is critical, he just does not have the same biting tone he uses for other religions. I am also shocked that he would suggest that there is much better historical evidence for Muhammad than there is for Jesus. Hitchens, himself, points out how long after the death of Muhammad that the first biography appears. Whereas we have information in Paul twenty to thirty years after and in the Gospels forty to fifty years after. Hitchens just seems bent toward the non-historical Jesus bias.
The rest of the chapters are about examples of cargo cults, Mormons, charlatan healing evangelists, falsified Catholic miracles and Jewish sectarian groups. I neither have the background nor the interest to go into detail to defend each group. He is likely correct in his criticisms in some of these areas. But so what? He is trying to show that religion is bad. Is immorality or error in some religious examples the same thing as religion being about immorality or error? How hard would it be to find examples in politics, law, police or business of people who used their position for their own profit and were not sincere in how they portrayed themselves? Could we then conclude that all these things must be inherently bad? Not likely. So why does Hitchens think he can get away with this for religion?
