I liked Hitchens' books For the Sake of Argument, The Trial of Henry Kissinger and at least a good part of No One Left to Lie To. I read somewhere that his book on Orwell was, unoriginal, to say the least and I think there's no justification for his support for the US invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I think there's even less justification for his absurdities on that score having read his God is not Great. If he thinks Zionism is based on pointless delusion and that Christian apocalypse fantasies are ludicrous, then why does he imagine that the box-cutter armed Muslim hijackers are such a vital threat to civilization that they require the legitimation of wars of aggression and imperialism?
That aside, God is not Great is the book-length trashing of religion that I wanted Richard Dawkins' God Delusion to be. Religions are old stories, cooked-up by small, geographically limited communities in ancient times, to attempt to explain a confusing existence. Whatever sincerity they possess has always been marred by cynical, power-hungry deviants and sadists. Religion poisons everything and it's time has past. It is not a neutral thing, producing good or evil depending upon who is using it. It lends itself best to bad things and it is so easily deformed by frauds and monsters because of its inherent properties.
The day after I finished it, some guy at Yonge and Dundas tried to give me a pamphlet on Islam and, later in the afternoon, a whole troop of Mennonites (or Amish) were belting out some hymns on the opposite corner. Having my contempt for the continued adherence to these incoherent myths so recently strengthened, I found the whole thing hard to take.
These idiotic stories are pointless diversions. They deform your lives. Abandon them.
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