More with Hitchen's new book...

After completing "God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," I can't say that I feel much more enlightened, so to speak, with regards to religion and God.

Although I was confirmed in the Roman Catholic religion a few years ago, my approach to "faith," or the unknowable, has drastically changed since that service on the Eve of Easter. Even at the point of my first communion, I did not think that Catholics were better than Protestants, or that other religions were any less poignant. I didn't think the Pope was possessed the abilities as defined by the doctrine of infallibility. I was far from being a fundamentalist.

One interesting point that Hitchens touches upon at various instances in the book is that religion is an anthropomorphic entity. Essentially, God is a product of human imagination and creation. However, how one defines God is quite problematic. Is the God in the Pentateuch the same as that of the New Testament (the latter is more relaxed, the former more...dickhead-ish?).

Hitchens writes:

God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization (8).

Ouch.

One criticism that I have with Hitchens' book is that he does not do enough to distinguish the fundamentalist religious follower with that of the more, for lack of a better word, liberal (or "open-minded," or "with-it") follower. Andrew Sullivan, a gay (and conservative!) Catholic comes immediately to mind. Or the many individuals, whose modest yet no less noble attempts at non-hostile co-habitation, which is often dwarfed by the zealous behavior of the fundamentally-based interpretations of various religionists, are hardly accounted for. Instead, the reader gets the impression that Hitchens gathers all religion-followers into one big pot of "crazy."

The warnings and criticism that Hitchens weighs against fundamental beliefs are quite potent and largely accurate. In addition, the writing ability that he possesses is superb. However, by allocating all religious persons together, Hitchens fails to realize the effects that his belief that God is an anthropomorphic creation has on his larger thesis. It should not be how "religion poisons everything," but how people poison religion.