God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (original 2007; edição 2009)

If you identify yourself as an atheist but aren't able to clarify your arguments against religion, then God is Not Great will help strengthen your position and provide ammunition if you find yourself in a religious debate.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Mr. Hitchens and I thought it was great. I enjoy when the author reads their own work -- feels like I'm sitting in a lecture hall.

Also, if you have read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins then you may find may similar arguments here. The one difference is that where Mr. Dawkins is combative and insulting, Hitchens is smooth.

Overall great book. ( )

I love Hitchen's writing. Witty and engaging, this is perhaps his less impressive work. It is not so much the content or the ideas, there seems to be something that is missing here. I can't quite put my finger on it, though I agree with everything he said, there was a lack of engagement. It pains me to give it only 3 stars because the work he made here is so thorough, but I found myself getting bored frequently, which is very rare when I read Hitch. ( )

Good book, hitting many of the same points as Dawkins in "The God Delusion," but in a less vitriolic manner. ( )

This is standard Hitch -- witty attacks on stuff he doesn't like, with "witty" prioritized over "fair" or "comprehensive". Very entertaining, and if you already support his positions, enjoyable. Probably not an effective method of argumentation to convince a neutral party or cause an opponent to re-evaluate beliefs in any way.

I like that Hitch read the audiobook himself, but his voice is really inefficient for 2-3x speed audiobook playback, especially over phone speaker -- he speaks words themselves quickly with long pauses between them -- so I had to listen using headphones. ( )

"The barbaric vernacular word for roasted human in New Guinea and elsewhere was 'long pig': I have never had the relevant degustatative experience myself, but it seems that we do, if eaten, taste very much like pigs."

"The simultaneous attraction and repulsion derived from an anthropomorphic root: the look of the pig, and the taste of the pig, and the dying yells of the pig, and the evident intelligence of the pig, were too uncomfortably reminiscent of the human. Porcophobia--and porcophilia--thus probably originate in a nighttime of human sacrifice and even cannibalism at which the 'holy' texts often do more than hint. Nothing optional--from homosexuality to adultery--is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in 'King Lear', the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash." ( )