God is Not Great, The End of Faith
I recently gave Chris Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” and Sam Harris’s “The End of Faith” some listening time, and thought I’d share some impressions.
My biggest impression is that these books are pretty much cut from the same cloth. Hitchens has, as his basic thesis, that the whole idea of religion poisons everything in the world. Harris has a pretty similar view, that the presence of faith is a corrupting influence in the world.
Both Hitchens and Harris are pretty hard on the Jews and on Muslims, too, and Harris especially beats up on Islam for its intrinsic and unmoderated violence. Neither of them loses any love in the direction of the Christian establishment either, and neither has any illusions about the violence inspired by dominant Buddhism and Hinduism, and they both spend a bit of time dispelling false beliefs about so-called “peaceful religions”….
Both books have another similarity too: they spend significant amounts of time in hamfisted brutalizing of their points. Like …. I think Harris spends like 30 minutes of the 9 hour book citing chapter and verse from the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah as examples of the violence inherent in those books. Hitchens spends probably the latter third of his book beating on various historical issues pointing out how the jews were nasty people before they were the displaced minority, about how the muslims have been getting progressively nastier, about how christianity marched boldly into some really dark times.
That’s really my biggest complaint about these books … they both make good cases for their points, but at some point you just kind of have to look at the flayed mound of horseflesh and realize that there’s not much point in continuing to beat on it. That’s it.
Harris spends some time exploring non-religious spirituality … meditation, the exploration of the concept of self as subject and illusion, the nature of mind…. stuff like that. So from a phenomenological perspective, his work is pretty interesting, and leaves the window open for spirituality while slamming shut the door of dogmatic faith. He also spends time exploring a scientific morality and some of the problems with figuring out where our moral sphere does and doesn’t extend given the absence of an imposed religious order. So even if you’re going to opt to skip over the half a chapter that’s built entirely of bloody verses from holy books, the philosophical subject matter is worth thinking about.
Hitchens spends more of his time on history, talking about how religions around the world were basically the source of all kinds of evil, and how even ostensibly atheistic movements that turned out pretty badly generally involved elevating a leader to the level of occult figurehead. Less of the Stephen Pinker philosophical rigor, more of the journalistic bent.
Still, if you’re interested in hearing about how religion is bad for things, both books are pretty good things to sink your time into.