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God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything | 
| Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
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Rating:  106 reviews
Sales Rank: 525
Media: Paperback
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 1843545748
EAN: 9781843545743
ASIN: 1843545748
Publication Date: March 1, 2008
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews: Read 101 more reviews...
 All too human... November 18, 2008
A reader (UK)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I make one simple point: does religion per se create evil,
or does humanity create evil in its name? The point has been
made over and over again that any great system of thought
creates zealots who are prepared to kill in its name. Humans
like and crave for certainty, and they cannot tolerate having
their certainty challenged. It is simply a non sequitur for
authors like Hitchens constantly to bang on about the evil done
in religions' names. When will people stop peddling this tired
old fallacy? It does not address the substance of the argument.
Does the atom bomb invalidate nuclear physics? Of course not. Let's
hear the *arguments* for the non-existence of God, not the
emotive (alas too tragic) nonsense that really amounts only to
a lamentation of humanity's disastrous history.
 God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens November 4, 2008
G. Wilson (Aberdeenshire, Scotland)
0 out of 8 found this review helpful
Perhaps a danger with these 'Down with God' books is in assuming that God and Religion are related. It is possible to have a bad experience of religion, which is a man made thing. But if a person denies the very existence of God in the first place. How can a person who denies the existence of something write about something that they consider does not exist? Mmmm
In doing this are they not then giving body to something that they previously considered didn't exist - so that they are now writing about an entity that does exist?
It can only truly be presented that 'God is not Great' from personal experience, not from carrying out an academic study on whether another person considered whether 'God was not Great'. It is then necessary for the writer to relate from personal experience why they consider 'God is not Great'.
Thinking book October 4, 2008
Mr X (London)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book does make you think in two sense of that phrase: it makes you consider the big questions in life and it also makes you concnetrate hard to understand it in places.
I liked the book when considering it in the round. It think that Hitchens is clearly a very clever individual, well-read and who has considered his subject-matter in some detail and is very familiar with it. But this is part of the downside to the book in that, for someone like me, who is not a philosopher and who does not have a good grounding in the subject matter, it is difficult to follow in places (quite a few places).
I have also read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins recently and on balance I prefer Dawkins book. That said, the two books are written in different styles (Dawkins adopting more of a step by step guide, whereas Hitchens' approach is more conversational).
These books are very different to the books I would usually read and I think I have benefitted greatly from reading them, but to others who have not read them I would say that you need to be sitting quietly and without distraction to get the most out of the book!
 God is not......... September 23, 2008
C. Franklin (West Sussex. UK)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Great book. Unfortunately, I suspect the only people who will read it already know that God isn't!
 Welcome to celestial North Korea September 22, 2008
Damian Patrick Kelly (Manchester UK)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Dawkins has God on the floor and the Hitch has jumped into the ring and got a sneaky boot in. Booo, hiss! This book starts from where Dawkins left off i.e. there is no good reason for belief in anything with no evidence (e.g. the tooth fairy, flying spaghetti monster God etc). All these things might exist but it seems unlikely. Hitchens goes a step further and tries to show that not only does God probably not exist but it would be bad if he did. He describes Heaven as a celestial North Korea.
It seems a strong case but is based entirely around the portrayal of God in the world's religions. It seems possible to me that God does exist but religions are man made and have got God all wrong. Personally I'm not sure whether it matters whether God exists. I like to hope that we do not cease to exist when we die and I certainly hope we are more than our bodies. But I recognise that this is probably wishful thinking and I am not sure where a God or God's fit into all this.
This is a good read for making you think about such questions. And as always Hitchens writes wonderfully.
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