2008-08-18 A Comprehensive Argument against Religion

I was a convinced secularist before I started buying books on the subject. The first book I tried was Dawkins 'The God Delusion' and I found it rather disappointing. Perhaps the key reason is that Dawkins is a scientist while I am, if anything, a historian. Dawkins spent too much time for my liking showing how Darwin's theories are the answer to all the questions that religious people claim that their religions solve. The book was a struggle for someone like me who does not start with a good understanding of natural selection.

Hitchens on the other hand has produced a book that completely met my needs. The book gives a thorough account of the attitudes and beliefs of various religions, and, most important, their histories, the crimes that have been committed by them.

I must make it clear that I don't mean crimes committed by individuals who happened to profess some particular religion, I mean crimes committed by and in the name of the religion itself. The harmful effect that religions have on the young, the way they have persecuted anyone who is different, the hate that they irrationally generate, ....

Everyone with a modicum of education knows how the Catholic church forced Gallileo to deny what he knew to be true, and that the Dutch Reformed church supported apartheid. But I certainly did not know that Catholic support for the Nazis was so strong that when Hitler died Irish president de Valera dressed formally and went by stage coach to offer his condolences to the German embassy in Dublin. The book is full of accounts of religions' wickedness.

Indeed, the book presents the case against religion so forcefully that it is as if Hitchens is a barrister prosecuting religion in a court of law. Every crime, every fallacy, every wickedness is exposed. It is almost inconceivable that anyone who reads the book with other than a completely closed mind will be a believer by the time he finishes.

Unlike the Dawkins book, there is not one passage where the text makes difficult reading. As Dawkins himself is quoted as saying on the front cover (at least of the paperback edition) 'If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline.'

The case against religion could not have been more clearly or more comprehensively presented. An excellent book.