The late Christopher Hitchens once ranked, with Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, among the â??four horsemenâ? of the New Atheism. His most comprehensive attack on religious faith came in a best-seller called â?? and donâ??t miss the titleâ??s lowercased first word â?? â??god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everythingâ? (Twelve, 2009).
Hitchens was a superb and witty writer, but this is an excruciatingly bad book, crammed to bursting with historical and other errors. Still, it continues to exert considerable influence, so weâ??ll look at one representative page â?? page 125 â?? of his book. Weâ??ll focus on the Bible, but other illustrations (such as, for example, the Buddhist canon) would have made our case just as well.
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