God Is Not Great (Review)

God Is Not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything.  Written by Christopher Hitchens.

Go ahead and have your views on religion in general, or specific ones, but I guarantee that you haven’t invested as much time into understanding faith as this well known atheist.  A proponent of critical thinking, Hitchens proceeds to lampoon all religions from a historical, scientific, and ethical context.  If you are religious, ambivalent of faith, or an atheist you need to read this.  It may just change your perspective.

Some of the chapter titles give a brief overview:
2.  Religion Kills
3.  A Short Digression on the Pig; or, Why Heaven Hates Ham
4.  A Note on Health, to Which Religion Can Be Hazardous
9.  The Koran Is Borrowed from Both Jewish and Christian Myths
13.  Does Religion Make People Behave Better?

In fighting Polio in 2001 you needed two drops of medicine.  “Muslim die-hards were spreading the story that the droplets were a plot.  If you took this sinister Western medicine, you would be stricken by impotence and diarrhea…”
“Islamic religious figures issued a ruling, or fatwa, that declared the polio vaccine to be a conspiracy by the United States”

“…Cardinal Alfonso Lopez de Trujillo, the vatican’s president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, carefully warning his audience that all condoms are secretly made with many microscopic holes, through which the AIDS virus can pass…”

“Violent, Irrational, Intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”

“As in all cases, the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly.”

“Since all of these revelations, many of them hopelessly inconsistent, cannot by definition be simultaneously true, it must follow that some of them are false and illusory.”

“The simple fact is that the New testament, as we know it, is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin, but others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of having been tampered with.” – H. L. Mencken

“Not only did Islam begin by condemning all doubters to eternal fire, but it still claims the right to do so in almost all of its dominions, and still preaches that these same dominions can and must be extended by war.  There has never been an attempt in any age to challenge or even investigate the claims of Islam that has not been met with extremely harsh and swift repression.”

re-read this a few times to gain its full impact:
“Is it not true that if people cease to believe in god, they do not believe in nothing but in anything?” – G. K. Chesterton

“The urge to ban and censor books, silence dissenters, condemn outsiders, invade the private sphere, and invoke an exclusive salvation is the very essence of the totalitarian.  The fatalism of Islam, which believes that all is arranged by Allah in advance, has some points of resemblance in its utter denial of human autonomy and liberty, as well as in its arrogant and insufferable belief that its faith already contains everything that anyone might ever need to know.”

“Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever.”