The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Like-minded readers will enjoy his arguments, too.
It’s clear from page to page that Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, is having a grand time twitting the folks in the white collars and purple dresses, in the turbans and beehives. And all that’s before taking on Joseph Smith, and Mohammed, and. Wouldn’t he feel more comfortable, the televangelist asked, to learn that they had just left a religious service? Citing personal experiences in cities only beginning with B-Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Baghdad-Hitchens answers emphatically in the negative.
Hitchens, a brave grappler quite obviously unafraid of giving offense, cheerfully takes on all comers, from mullahs to commissars to Mahatma Gandhi-and a noted televangelist who once challenged him with a thought experiment in which, in a foreign land, Hitchens is approached by a large group of men. Just ask Salman Rushdie-or Giordano Bruno. And the author adds another twist of the knife: Religion makes people crazy, violent and ill-behaved. Hitchens, forthrightly in the latter camp, offers “four irreducible objections to religious faith” at the outset, namely that religion misrepresents human origins and those of the universe at large that owing to this, religion combines “the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism” that religion suppresses sexuality to a dangerous degree and that religion is a species of wishful-thinking. Lewis or Malcolm Muggeridge, sometimes they turn into committed atheists. Why, if God was great, did he need to be praised “so incessantly for doing what came to him naturally”? If Jesus could heal the blind, why didn’t he do away with blindness? Such doubts arrive to all proper questioners sometimes they turn into C.S.
Hitchens opens by recalling an epistemological crisis. So he reveals in this pleasingly intemperate assault on organized religion. Put an -ism onto it, and whatever it is, noted polemicist and contrarian Hitchens ( Love, Poverty, and War, 2005, etc.) is likely to decimate it.
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