Observers of the Christopher Hitchens phenomenon have been expecting a book about religion from him around now. But this impressive and enjoyable attack on everything so many people hold dear is not the book we were expecting ... He has written, with tremendous brio and great wit, but also with an underlying genuine anger, an all-out attack on all aspects of religion ... Hitchens’s erudition is on display — impressively so, and perhaps sometimes pretentiously so ... Hitchens has outfoxed the Hitchens watchers by writing a serious and deeply felt book, totally consistent with his beliefs of a lifetime. And God should be flattered: unlike most of those clamoring for his attention, Hitchens treats him like an adult.
... an unrelenting enumeration of religion's sins and wickedness, written with much of the rhetorical pomp and all of the imperial condescension of a Vatican encyclical ... Hitchens says a lot of true things in this wrongheaded book...What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself ... assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery. But it is Hitchens who is the naïf. To read this oddly innocent book as gospel is to believe that ordinary Catholics are proud of the Inquisition, that ordinary Hindus view masturbation as an offense against Krishna ... Readers with any sense of irony -- and here I do not exclude believers -- will be surprised to see how little inquiring Hitchens has done and how limited and literal is his own ill-prepared reduction of religion ... Christopher Hitchens is a brilliant man, and there is no living journalist I more enjoy reading. But I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject. In the end, this maddeningly dogmatic book does little more than illustrate one of Hitchens's pet themes -- the ability of dogma to put reason to sleep.
[Hitchens] is effortlessly witty and entertaining as well as utterly rational. Believers will be disturbed and may even charge him with blasphemy (he questions not only the virgin birth but the very existence of Jesus), and he may not change many minds, but he offers the open-minded plenty to think about.
[Hitchens] is a grand rhetorician, and his double-barrelled shotgun of a book is high entertainment ... All this stylish unfairness and wit is tremendously good fun. As with Voltaire, his scornful laughter is a powerful weapon. But as with Voltaire, his demolition of traditional religion is finally missing something, which you find, say, in the poetry of Thomas Hardy: a sense of the deep psychic wound caused by the rupture with our immediate past and our forebears when we wave goodbye to our religion; and the subsequent pathos of our post-religious cosmic loneliness.
At their best, his indictments are trenchant and witty, and the book is a treasure house of zingers worthy of Mark Twain or H. L. Mencken. At other times, his impatience with the smug denial of the self-righteous gets the better of him, and then he strikes glancing blows at best, and occasionally adopts a double standard, excusing his naturalist heroes for their few lapses into religious gullibility on the grounds that they couldn't have known any better at the time, while leaving no such wiggle room for the defenders of religion over the ages. But these excesses are themselves a valuable element of this wake-up call.
... Hitchens can not resist the scatter-shot approach. He jumps around from example to example, barely attempting to put together any coherent argument, making for an exhausting and not very satisfying read ... This role of religion, in controlling people and accumulating and exercising power, is perhaps its most dangerous consequence; Hitchens does a decent job of showing that, but, as with everything else in the book, he gets drawn away on tangents even as he makes this argument ... Most of the objections are familiar, and if some of the examples (and the way they are put) are more colourful than usual they are still not effectively presented in any way that is likely to lead a believer (or a sympathiser) to re-think their attitude. As for readers who agree with Hitchens, they'll wonder what the fuss is about as he keeps stating yet more of the obvious. Certainly, his call for 'a renewed Enlightenment' is one that one wishes would be heeded, but it seems unlikely that this book will help pave the way.
This book is not only a polemic against literalism; it is an attack on any accommodation between religion and science, faith and progress ... Some of the fights he picks make sparkling reading...But the problem with Hitchens’ thesis that religion poisons everything is how to explain those who use it to do good ... So King wasn’t really religious and Stalin was. If that sort of intellectual and moral shabbiness is to your taste, this book should be too.
What a strangely mild and irrelevant title Christopher Hitchens chose for his potent and incisive polemic ... This is merely an exceedingly cultured, erudite, thorough, impeccably constructed case for the prosecution of organised religion, to which it's impossible to imagine a defence.
... underneath all the blasphemy is a quieter sort of indignation. God does not bother Hitchens so much as the suggestion that human beings cannot make ethical decisions without consulting an instruction manual ... For a man who is frequently labeled a misanthrope, Christopher Hitchens has an unexpected faith in humankind.
Hitchens is the latest fire-and-brimstone atheist. Having sharpened his ire on targets such as Mother Teresa, whom he once denounced as a fanatic, he now takes on an opponent he may consider to be more his own size ... This is Hitch versus God, slugged out to the bloody death ... On the evidence of this book, Hitchens has spent too much time around religion, not too little. Like an ex-smoker who grows to loathe the habit more than those who have not tasted nicotine, he abominates God with the zealotry implicit in dictatorial faith. Anyone who has grown up in the shadow of hellfire evangelism will recognise some answering echo here. This is a papal bull for the non-believer ... Hitchens does not get to grips with the power of a blind trust that, far from being snuffed out, seems more unquenchable than ever now that all the lies and deceptions of organised religion have been exposed by science. Nor does he examine what, beyond rank stupidity, drives communities and states back to primitive belief ... Hitchens's book will be manna to the converted, but his explicit aim is to win believers to his cause. I doubt that he will reclaim a single soul.
Hitchens, one of our great political pugilists, delivers the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. The same contrarian spirit that makes him delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has God placed in the dock ... Hitchens's one-liners bear the marks of considerable sparring practice with believers. Yet few believers will recognize themselves as Hitchens associates all of them for all time with the worst of history's theocratic and inquisitional moments. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling believers' weaker arguments ... The book's real strength is Hitchens's on-the-ground glimpses of religion's worst face in various war zones and isolated despotic regimes. But its weakness is its almost fanatical insistence that religion poisons 'everything,' which tips over into barely disguised misanthropy.
... [a] pleasingly intemperate assault on organized religion ... It’s clear from page to page that Hitchens is having a grand time twitting the folks in the white collars and purple dresses, in the turbans and beehives. Like-minded readers will enjoy his arguments, too.
