To believe or not?

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God is great! An atheist’s Bible at last...

Post Godhra, modern India, presumably the hottest economy on the world map, has experienced an appalling swell in terms of right wing fundamentalism. Be it the likes of Togadias & Modis or the vociferous Imam Bukhari, there lies in their discourses, in excessive doses, sheer illogical reasoning veiling profane agendas. While reflecting on those lines, there are hurled the ideas of assumed ‘lighthouses’ of Indian spiritualism against Christopher Hitchens, the confirmed atheist & ‘ridiculer’ of people proclaiming to be God-sent to benefit mankind. But his is a belief backed by exhaustive reasoning that comes alive in his latest offering, ‘God is not Great.’

“Why, if God was the creator of all things, were we supposed to ‘praise’ him so incessantly for doing what came to him naturally?” Sparks off Hitchens, who’s come down hard on ideas propagating faith & belief as a source to living ‘the good life’. “If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness? What was so wonderful about his casting out devils, so that the devils would enter a herd of pigs instead?” His thoughts & deliberations, although of an extreme view, do catch the reader (& especially, the believer) off guard & oft en without any substantial point to counter. He challenges those very myths that form the backbone of various established religions. And in this religion bashing lies the essence of the book that goes by the sub-line, ‘religion poisons everything’.

“There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man & the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result & the cause of dangerous sexual repression, & that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.” Hitchens calls the Bible a sham, a license “for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, & for indiscriminate massacre,” & refers to the Koran as a text heavily borrowed from Old & New Testament s . Evidently he spends more time & pages damming religion than any other extensions to faith.

Extremely well argued & satisfactory to put behind any notion regarding the book as a mere jihad against believers, for it offers in a single volume arguments ranging from the scientific front to massive irregularities in the holy texts themselves. While most are confronted with exasperation as one would expect out of a Physics professor trying to instil the logic of Newton’s laws into a rogue with an IQ of a swine, some are extremely entertaining, especially for those who do not swear by the names of their various Gods at the instance of just the television channel broadcasting the evening bulletin. For example, “How could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all?” Or “Did the Jews not know that murder & adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments?” From Dawkins scientific rationalist refutation to God to echoes laid down by the likes of Freud, Mencken & Hume, God is not Great is a power packed thesis that delivers a massive blow to those who vouch by their respective faiths.

From the place of his birth, England, to America (New York & his current abode Washington), Hitchens is a well read figure & has a great following, perhaps as a matter of amusement for some. However, the book at times sounds overstretched with the clatter of a child trying to drill in his thoughts into the uninterested working nanny. A well-known critic of Clinton, Hitchens is probably the only one with a functional brain to support Bush’s war on Iraq. That leaves enough matter for the reader to take his or her pick. Amen.

Edit bureau: Shashank Shekhar

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2007

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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