Bookmark on the Beach: Christopher Hitchens debate promo

From The Atlantic Online: Christopher Hitchens on his beef with religion, his faith in mankind, and his new bestselling book, God Is Not Great

Transcending God

It’s an image that could make the most hardened cynic smile: a miniature Christopher Hitchens, fair-haired and apple-cheeked, trotting across a meadow in ankle-strap sandals. It’s a gentle season in a gentle era. Britain has won the war, the ruins have been repaired—the Dartmoor ponies are grazing, the grass is lush and verdant. Nine-year-old Christopher is excelling at school and has a special fondness for Bible studies. By all appearances, God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.

On this particular outing, Christopher’s religion instructor, a kindly old widow, is using the natural surroundings to demonstrate God’s love for humankind. In His infinite kindness, she explains, He made the grass green, a color that would please and soothe the human eye. “I simply knew,” Hitchens would later write, “almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences.” In the green fields of England, an atheist is born.

 

Continue reading From The Atlantic Online: Christopher Hitchens on his beef with religion, his faith in mankind, and his new bestselling book, God Is Not Great...

Excerpts from an episode of Books & Ideas featuring Christopher Hitchens

From the Plum Original Series Books & Ideas, excerpts from an episode featuring Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken author who shares his controversial opinions regarding God and religion.

God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Religion, Christopher Hitchens writes, “is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” This controversial book, which reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list, struck a resonant chord in American culture: predictably embraced in some quarters and attacked in others, it has been fiercely debated everywhere. With his usual writerly brio, Hitchens make a number of claims about religion, among them: that it calls for an unhealthy denial of human nature; that it incites violence, and servile deference to authority; that it suppresses free inquiry; and that it is scientifically inaccurate about the origins of the universe and the human race. Whether God Is Not Great infuriates you or affirms your (non)beliefs, it can hardly fail to engage you, and it provides an invigorating, if polemical, starting point for discussion.