God Is Not Great, initial thoughts

These are my ‘spark notes’ on God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchen’s classic 2007 polemic against religion in all its forms, and call to adopt secular humanism as its rightful replacement.

The book can be coherently read as a collection of independent essays. That said, with a few exceptions, each chapter in God Is Not Great contributes to one of three main themes, and I think this is a helpful way of summarising the overall movement of the book. The three themes I’ve identified are as follows:

1. Religion is evil
2. Religion is untrue
3. Secular humanism is a better alternative to religion

As for the exceptions: Chapters 13 and 17 in part contribute to both the first theme and the third, while Chapters 1, 3, 12 and 14 don’t fit into these broad themes, and are self-standing.

1. Religion is evil

• Chp 2
  • Religion is violent, because:
    • It has to be missionary, because it is insecure in its own beliefs (p17)
    • It provokes tribalistic conflict, in a similar manner to racism (pp35-36)
• Chp 4
  • Religion is bad for your health, because:
    • Faith in medicine is a threat to religion’s thrall (p47)
    • Religious doctrines may contradict sound medical advice
    • The right to religious freedom may be abused to deflect criticism of unhealthy practices (p50)
  • Religion has a special relationship with child abuse, and is incapable of accepting open moral criticism of itself for this
• Chp 13
  • Religion tends towards evil, because it requires fanaticism in order to spread, and fanaticism tends towards evil (p192)
• Chp 16
  • Religion causes child abuse, because:
    • Terrifying children with eschatology is child abuse
    • Religious education is propaganda and should not be inflicted on children who are not yet mature enough to respond to it rationally
    • Religion consistently mandates cruel genital mutilation of children
    • Christians and Muslims have spread misinformation about masturbation, which leads to dangerously sexually repressed adult men, which in turn leads to sexual abuse of children by those men (as well as sexual abuse of women)
    • Child abuse in churches is not a case of a few bad eggs, it is institutional and based on an ideological need to control the minds and sexual organs of children
  • Religion institutionalised torture in medieval Europe
  • Religion makes honest and nuanced debate about abortion impossible, because:
    • Nuanced debate is pushed out by extreme and implausible religious doctrine
    • Religious people would rather use the unborn as objects of doctrine than human beings in need of protection
• Chp 17
  • Religion is the only reason anti-Semitism is possible
  • Religion in its fullest expression is indistinguishable from totalitarianism, because:
    • The defining characteristic of both religion and totalitarianism is the absolute right to rule of the ruler, even when they rule with caprice
    • Religion and totalitarianism are also characterised by the need to extinguish heresy with violence
    • Religion and totalitarianism alike must propose a total solution to all life’s problems, require blind faith from its adherents, and demand all aspects of life public and private be submitted to total supervision. This doesn’t bring out the best in us
    • Religious/totalitarian systems are unable to take accountability and therefore improve over time, in contrast to secular humanist systems
    • History has proven this as fact:
      • In the ancient world, religious totalitarianism was the normal form of government
      • Calvin, the inspiration for the Presbyterian Christian tradition, which included South African apartheid, was the epitome of a totalitarian dictator, demanding total control on the private lives of his citizens in Geneva, on the pain of humiliation in this life and eternal torment in the next
    • History has also proven that, rather than standing in opposition to the supposedly secular totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, religion actually aided and abetted totalitarianism:
      • Rome supported fascist movements throughout Europe, including Italy, Hungary, Spain, and Ireland
      • Rome accommodated Naziism by handing over control of its schools, permitting the use of parish records to identify those with Jewish ancestry, disbanding Catholic opposition political parties, declaring Hitler’s birthday a Church holiday, and running the ‘rat line’ to South America after the military defeat of Naziism
      • Although not quite as arse-licking as the Vatican, Germany’s Protestant churches also mostly capitulated to Nazi totalitarianism
      • Japanese soldiers committed enormous atrocities across the Far East in the name of their god-emperor, Hirohito
      • The strategy of the Communists was first, to use religion as a prop to gain power, and then to replace religion with itself. Notice the striking commonalities between religion and communist totalitarianism:
        • Infallible leaders
        • A permanent war on heresy
        • Institutionalised torture
        • Scapegoating the innocent rather than accepting accountability for failures
        • Justifying any means necessary in order to achieve an ultimate end

2. Religion is untrue

• Chp 5
  • Religion was a barbaric attempt to explain physical phenomena. Science now does a much better job, so religion can be discarded as a redundant theory
• Chp 6
  • Religion is ‘solipsistic’, which is to say:
    • Religion divides the world into an in-group and an out-group
    • When the in-group receives good fortune, that is interpreted as God’s blessing
    • When the in-group receives bad fortune, this is inexplicable
    • Whatever happens to the out-group is irrelevant
    • This is a redundant theory which explains little, and therefore we should not believe it
• Chp 7
  • We should believe that the Pentateuch is a fiction, because:
    • Exodus is inconsistent with the archaeological evidence
    • Textual evidence in Deuteronomy suggests the texts were written much later than the supposed events were supposed to have taken place
    • Throughout the Pentateuch, Moses is referred to in the third person, which is not consistent with the claim that Moses himself authored it
    • The Pentateuch contains events we should hope to be false, such as Moses ordering multiple massacres, and the Ten Commandments classifying wives as their husbands’ property
    • The Pentateuch - indeed, the whole Bible - is limited in scope to a small corner of the Middle East, which is not consistent with the universal nature of the supposed God who is supposed to have inspired its authorship
  • Chp 8
    • We should not believe the Gospels, because:
      • Matthew and Luke disagree on the virgin conception
      • Matthew and Luke disagree on the genealogy of Jesus
      • Matthew and Luke disagree on when Mary and Jesus escaped to Egypt
      • Luke dates the birth of Christ during both the reign of Herod in Judea and the governorship of Quirinius in Syria, but these two events did not overlap, so this is impossible
      • As far as we know, the Romans did not, and would not, demand that the people assemble in one place in order to be counted for a census
      • The Gospels disagree about the Sermon on the Mount
      • The Gospels disagree about the Anointing of Jesus
      • The Gospels disagree about the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus
      • The Gospels disagree about the betrayal of Judas
      • The Gospels disagree about the denial of Peter
      • John suggests he thinks Jesus was probably born in Galilee to an ordinary family with no proven link to King David’s genealogy
      • Mary’s attested behaviour during the ministry of Jesus is not consistent with the Nativity story
      • John 8:3-11 (the stoning of the woman caught in adultery) is a later insertion to John’s Gospel
    • Chp 9: the Koran is borrowed from a hotchpotch of Jewish and Christian myths
    • Chp 10
      • Miracles (such as the Resurrection of Jesus) should not be believed, because:
        • See Hume’s On Miracles
        • Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
        • Believing miracles is comparable to believing reports of aliens (p144)
    • Chp 11
      • Religions are founded in credulity
    • Chp 15
      • The crucifixion story makes no sense, because:
        • I’m supposed to be morally responsible for Adam’s sin, but I amn’t!
        • Even Adam can’t be fully blamed for Adam’s sin, because he was set up!
        • The Jews who crucified Jesus are supposed to be blameworthy for their crime, even though the crucifixion was allegedly both necessary and inevitable
        • I’m allegedly given the free will to either accept or deny the offer, even though denying the offer will lead to an eternity of torment: any sensible God who cared a mite would not have given me the choice
      • Religious rules are impossible to follow, and this leads to either spiritual policing, organised hypocrisy, or both

3. Secular humanism is a better alternative to religion

• Chp 13
  • Faith has inspired great heroism. But the heroism is better explained by the heroes’ humanism than it is by their faith itself
    • For example, Martin Luther King Junior didn’t really preach Christianity, because he preached forgiveness, while Christ preached eternal torment for the ‘inattentive’ (pp175-6)
• Chp 17
  • Religion is the only thing sustaining anti-Semitism
  • Secular humanist political systems can take accountability, respond to criticism and improve over time, while religious systems exempt themselves from legitimate criticism, stifling progress
  • The only alternative to totalitarianism is pluralism, which is inherently secular
• Chp 18
  • Secular humanism has been a powerful positive force throughout history in face of oppression by religion, as proved by example:
    • Socrates proved that conscience is innate, and that a great way to mock dogma is with satire which pretends to accept that dogma
    • Lucretius, Democritus and Epicurus had better explanations for the way the world worked than religion (which is why their work was suppressed in Christian Europe and nearly lost forever as a result). Once rediscovered, their ideas kick-started the Scientific Revolution in Europe
    • Spinoza’s deistic ideas had a huge influence despite Jews collaborating with their Christian oppressors to try and ban his writing out of existence
    • Boyle and Voltaire may have been closet atheists, agnostics or deists
    • Kant ‘overthrew’ the cosmological and ontological arguments for the existence of God, and proved (by means of the Categorical Imperative) that human decency does not require any theological assumptions
    • Let’s chuck some more names in the ring: Gibbon, Hume, Paine, Franklin, Darwin, Einstein
    • Jews were once doubly ghettoed: on the outside by oppressive Christians, and on the inside by oppressive self-racialisation. Secular humanism freed Jews from both these ghettoes, which in turn led to an outpouring of secular Jewish brilliance
    • Ancient Jews were on the road to a quasi-secular Hellenism, before that was ruined forever by the tyrannical and fanatical Judas Maccabeus, with disastrous consequences for the history of Western civilisation. The Abrahamic religions we know today were not inevitable, and it is possible to imagine what Western history would have been like without it
• Chp 19
  • Secular humanism is a better alternative to religion, because:
    • Religion requires clinging to immovable dogma and being unwilling to change your mind
    • Seeking truth requires being willing to change your mind
    • Secular humanism is therefore on the side of seeking truth, and religion is on the side of wilful ignorance
  • Secular humanism is on the side of progress, because it is what enables the expansion of scientific knowledge and the development of new technology

The odds and ends

• Chp 1: an introduction to the themes of the book with little substantial
• Chp 3: titled ‘A Short Digression on the Pig’, it does what it says on the tin
• Chp 12: titled ‘A Coda: How Religions End’, it does what it says on the tin
• Chp 14: contrary to the hopes of some Westerners disillusioned with organised Western religion, Eastern religions like Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism are not a solution to the problems of religion

I would be interested to try writing apologetic and/or evangelistic responses to these ideas. But it’s not a priority for me right now. Anyway, if I ever want to come back to it, I’ll probably come back to these spark notes to give me a head start.