GOD DEBATE WILL FORCE PEOPLE TO THINK RATIONALLY?

On my vacation in Door County, the chosen reading material is "God is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens. Hopefully my wife will not be too disappointed in me that I am choosing athiest reading material. I would like to ask her more about her feelings of Christianity and my doubting ways---to see what impact it has on our marriage, but she may not want to go that deep. Maybe my brother and sister will have opinions of Hitchens. I think they both have said Hitchens is arrogant, but my impression is that he is an extremely deep thinker, with good logical arguments for the various cases he lays out.

Here is an article I found through my news search on my blog:


GOD DEBATE COMING

The existence of God and the role of religion in modern society take center stage as two well-known authors and religious commentators go head to head on the topic, "God on Trial." The debate is being sponsored by Fixed Point Foundation, a non-profit Christian think tank based in Birmingham, Ala.
The "God on Trial" debate takes place on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008 at Powell Symphony Hall in St. Louis. The debate pits Christopher Hitchens, the author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, against Dinesh D'Souza, the author of What's So Great About Christianity, a book discussing the significance and uniqueness of the Christian faith. More information can be found at http://www.godontrialdebate.com.
Hitchens is a British-American author, journalist, and literary critic. In addition to his various books, he has been a columnist for several prominent publications, including Vanity Fair and The Nation. D'Souza is a New York Times bestselling author and a former policy analyst in the Reagan White House and several high-level fellowships at the American Enterprise Institute and the Robert and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
"This kind of debate and dialogue is very important -- and useful -- for people of all faiths," says Larry Taunton, Founder and Executive Director of the Fixed Point Foundation. "The decisions we make regarding the question of God's existence or non-existence has vast implications both for the individual and for society as a whole, so we do everything we can to encourage thoughtful consideration of these issues."
Fixed Point Foundation held its first debate of this kind last year in Birmingham, Ala. Titled "The God Delusion Debate," the event featured Dr. John Lennox and Professor Richard Dawkins.








Here is a very interesting review from Amazon on "God is Not Great:"

In the genre of athiest criticism of religion, Hitchens' book fills a niche. Where, for example, Bertrand Russel approaches religion with a philosophical mind, and Richard Dawkins approaches religion with a scientific mind, Hitchens approaches religion with a literary mind. This makes for some fresh and caustic athiest insights that you might not expect to find in either Russell or Dawkins. Hitchens, for example, begins his book by offering three quotes from classic pieces of literature, and within the first few pages he also alludes to George Eliot's "Middlemarch" without even mentioning Eliot's name (presuming his readers will know who wrote "Middlemarch"). In other words, Hitchens is a man of letters writing to educated, thoughtful people with more than a smattering of English literature classes in their background. In this sense, Hitchens, unlike Russell or Dawkins, leads his readers not just to think their way through the book's issues, but to feel them emotionally, in the way that one might feel one's way through a novel by Dostoevsky. Hitchens is always on the side of suffering individuals, and resists at every turn religion's dogmatism and "one size fits all" obtuseness. And in this sense Hitchens has hit upon an angle to come at religion that is not usually trodden: popular religion, unlike great literature, resists the tragic, the ambiguous, and the particular. Thus if you love literature, and identify with frail humanity via literature, you will resist the easy platitudes of religion. It is not just science and religion that are in tension for Hitchens, but literature and religion, or more accurately, the literary sensibility and religion.






Here is another review from Kabir Davis:

I have to say, the author gets it right both with his message and his research. I read excerpts of this book online at first, and even from that I knew that this wasn't just someone 'ranting and raving' against the 'establishment' but rather one who took the time out to educate himself, and then pass this education on to reasonably intelligent people. Heres the thing - nothing polarizes people as much as religion. I mean, EVERYONE has something to say about it, and EVERYONE gets defensive about it. Why do people get defensive? Its because no religion has proof of anything - just a bunch of abstract ideas and stories thrown together in random/organized fashion. No wonder we have so much chaos in the world today. I don't think the books tells us to blame any one religion. As I see it, the author is pretty clear when he says that ALL religion is to be doubted and questioned. He actually saves us the trouble because from the facts he presents, its quite evident that what we thought all along about organized religion is indeed the truth - it sucks. Not only that, there is money involved in the higher reaches of it, which is why you have jokes like The Pope and the Catholic Church still in existence with as much power as they have. We all know for example, that "The Bible" we have in its current form is the highly edited, rewritten version that the Church wants us to see. Now many of you reading this don't even want to believe that, because THAT is the effect your religion has upon you. It automatically blinds you to outside questioning, and makes you queasily defensive. An excellent read. I think that religions like Christianity, Islam, and even Buddhism, have seriously overstayed their welcome. Anything with a 'founder' should be doubted and questioned. As a product of parents of two religions, and being spiritually inclined myself, I have to say, the MESSAGE of all religions are pretty basic, but then again, if they're so basic, do you have to belong to that religion to practice these messages? Hitchens is not just an intelligent man, he is a very open person, and this comes across in spades. Instead of harsh and cruel name-calling, he only opens your eyes to the downside of your religion, and shows us that the reason you need to hold onto your religion is FEAR. Nothing else. If you weren't afraid you wouldn't need it. An excellent addition to the genre, and definitely the highlight of the year in the publishing field. Get this today, and WAKE UP!

Or how about this from perhaps a more intelligent reader?



At last somebody in the current wave of welcome atheist literature hits the right tone for me, much more so than Dawkins and Harris. He is aggressive against theism, but less so against deism: 'you can believe in a divine mover if you choose, but it makes no difference'. Dawkins is too fanatic about proving that this kind of god does not exist. Harris is too much caught in his small American world; small in the intellectual sense. (Not that he got much wrong.) We like to read things that confirm what we think anyway. (Alas, so do the believers.) I don't think I have learned all that much from Hitchens, but he says what he says so much more amusingly and with so much less dogmatism than others. He imports a sense of cosmopolitanism into the sometimes parochial anti-belief scene. Also, he does not seem to forget one essential aspect: the main enemy of reason and humanity is not religion as such, but anti-reason in whatever shape, i.e. atheist convictions are perfectly able to combine with murderous superstitions as well. We had some of those cases in history. The atheist is not as such a better person. Of course, the main thrust of the book is not about belief vs atheism, but about the various religions and their books and histories. Generally a sad history. Hitchens handles the big stumbling block of atheism gone genocidal very well in his chapter on an 'objection anticipated'. I also particularly appreciated the chapter on 'Eastern' religions, dealing specifically with the charlatanery of some gurus, and with the shameful involvement of some Buddhist schools in the Japanese militarism, comparable to the Vatican's shameful involvement with fascism. Of course the way that Hitchens attacks selected people, books, times, makes his book vulnerable to claims that he attacks strawmen, since people can easily disassociate from single elements and state that Hitchens had missed the point. That is an eternal element in this kind of discussion and seems ineradicable. But is Hitchens possibly boasting a little bit when he claims that he figured out the main falsities of faith already before puberty? I can't honestly say that I did. There was a vague sense of inconsistencies between the concepts of benevolence and allmightiness and the need to worship and the idea of permanent surveillance. But I definitely did not have this strong sense of revulsion against servility that I have now and that apparently came early to Hitchens. Respect.