A fascinating collection of essays

books:


	• The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever Christopher Hitchens Da Capo Press, 2007 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 43 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Nice collection, but very "anti-"

I thought it was pretty amazing to read that even as far back as 55 B.C., people had these thoughts: Lucretius. He even argued that the world can be accounted for in terms of atoms that are in perpetual motion. 55 B.C., that's pretty cool. Jumping forward in time, the piece by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1811) is way more explicit than I expected. He was expelled from Oxford and Cambridge universities, but his text survived. Dawkins, Dennett and Weinberg were inspiring. After reading a bunch though, I got a little bit depressed, because they were mostly about the bad aspects of religion, less about the good aspects of atheism. I want to see the sun. I see the sun, it's right there. Look, look! Maybe an idea for the next edition.

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Not so portable.

While this book has a wealth of different voices from influential people on the subject, at 500 pages, it is not so portable. I was expecting something more pocket sized.

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An excellent anthology

If you've been looking for a one-stop shop to explain why there are people who do not believe in a creator, this would be the place. Not so much an exposition as an anthology tied together with long introductions by Hitchens, you'll find a lot of perspectives here. Helpfully it includes more than just anti-Christian polemics: there are several reviews of Islamic thought and the Qu'ran which will be instructive and which are sufficiently balanced as not to be one straw man after another.

It could have been better. Another reviewer comments on this book not so much being atheist as anti-theist and I think they've hit something (notice I used "anti-Christian" and not "non-Christian" above). Certainly Hitchens himself is anti-religion and not just non-religious. But if you buy into his argument that religion is A Bad Thing(TM) then you also need to be on the attack. He does, and so he is. And that's fine, or it would be in a different book. But in an anthology it feels more appropriate to let the extracts speak for themselves without layering on top of them. Or at least it does to me.

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A fascinating collection of essays

This is a fantastic collection. For anyone just discovering their atheism I highly recommend this book - it brings together writings by atheists or agnostics over the last 2000 or so years, making some incredibly compelling arguments. I'm only halfway through at the moment, but I especially love Mark Twain's discussion of the fly.

Hatemongering

In view of my preceding title it may be wondered why I marked the book for three stars. I did it in recognition of the author's writing skill and erudition, of his somewhat justified criticism of dogma--especially today's violent expressions of it--and a little because of pity for his evidently sincerely misguided hatreds.

It seems for me unnecessary to go into the body of the book, which I haven't read and is featuring other authors, the reasonably long Introduction sufficing, in addition to comments on the Acknowledgments and the dedication, at which I start (unmarked page v).

The dedication is to a now deceased Holocaust survivor, and as a survivor myself I am thoroughly appalled by the twisting by Mr. Hitchens into "moral fortitude" some unfortunately very dismaying remarks by that survivor. That survivor, an atheist, complained for his own reasons about an old fellow-prisoner in Auschwitz because of the latter's praying ("thanking God because he has not been chosen [for] the gas-chamber" at the time), the survivor concluding with: "If I was God, I would spit at [the man's] prayer."

Thank God he wasn't God. He also wrote, on being tempted to pray when perceiving the imminence of death (there is something to the saying there are no atheists in foxholes): "A prayer...would have been...blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable". Nonbelieving seems itself quite a religion. As seen, we find a variety of views even among the same people in the same predicament, my concern here being the upside-down morality of such as Hitchens, who thinks that what is meritorious is spitting at the praying man, rather than comforting him.

Turning to other parts of the book, the author's attitude can in a nutshell be found in the Acknowledgements (p.xi) and at the end of the Introduction (p.xxvi). In the first he notes his indebtedness to a group that rejects "the absurd and wicked claims of the religious", and in the second he speaks of "resistance to...faith [in the] combat with humanity's oldest enemy". What an extreme of one-sidedness and vilification.

Regarding God himself, whom he consistently spells with a small "g" although the names of even the worst villains are accorded a capital, he attributes to him (p.xvi) "an unalterable and unchallengeable celestial dictatorship" and again (p.xxii) "a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and regarded us as its private property even after we died...How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis. And how grateful we should be to those...who repudiated this utter negation of human freedom."

The author should consider "reflection" on the laws of nature, by which he must abide unconditionally. God is conceived as the source of these laws and of any other he deems requisite as creator of Mr. Hitchens and everything else. The freedom Mr. Hitchens mentions was also granted, not negated, by God. Otherwise Mr. Hitchens's every action would be forced by inexorable physical laws, making him unable to as much as feed himself. The nonexistence of a "shred of respectable evidence" he speaks about is likewise false. The evidence may not be "respectable" to those he bows to, but they, too, are fallible. Mr. Hitchens talks as if he were a scientist and logician but is an authority in neither. He continually depends on natural selection as fact, and on absence of demonstration as refutation of God. Both can be disconfirmed, as I explained in other reviews here and more fully in On Proof for Existence of God, and Other Reflective Inquiries.

Mr. Hitchens expectably argues for a moral and beautiful atheist life, exceeding yet one under God. He says (pp.xvi-xvii) "I derive...satisfactions...from being of assistance to a fellow creature" or that the "Golden Rule is innate in us", condemning doing "a right action or avoid[ing] a wrong one [merely] for the hope of a divine reward or the fear of a divine retribution". Who do you think gave you the "innate" satisfaction in helping others? It wasn't Darwin. Notwithstanding your self-satisfaction of being moral, there is countless evidence that not only "sociopaths" and "psychopaths" act immorally left to themselves. As you say, "societies [don't] tolerate" various crimes, and that is why we have governments with laws applying to all. Similarly, concerning the beautiful you say (pp.xxii-xxiii) "there may be found a sense of awe and magnificence that does not depend at all on any invocation of the supernatural. Indeed, nobody armed by art and culture and literature and philosophy is likely to be anything but bored and sickened by", giving unlikely tales ending with, "babblings from the beyond". Again, your elitist pleasures are not likely to be shared by most, but more pertinently, whatever beauty is perceived in the world, it appears hollow without promise, and is more convincing as a gift of God than as accidental result of aimless forces.

Most objectionable in this book, however, may be its utmost besmirching of opponents, recognized even in its mild forms as the ad hominem fallacy, of wanting to win an argument by personal attack instead of reasoned presentation.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

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