God Is Not Great summary

Jesus once famously healed a blind man he touched. Yet, if Jesus was able to cure a blind man, then why did he not simply cure all blindness? The answer: he must have been either unable or unwilling.

Miracles such as this, along with other examples of God's power, do not and cannot stand up to closer analysis. Far from being examples of a divine judgment and omnipotence, they appear to be cheap magic tricks or the results of primitive misunderstandings of natural phenomena.

Religions often claim that they are the source of morality in the world. To reject religious teachings, they say, would result in a society with no ability to judge between right and wrong.

Such statements are obviously false, as non-religious people do have morals as well. In fact, historically, it is religions themselves that have promoted and spread the greatest amount of morally corrupt teachings – they are positively immoral.

North Korea is a unique country because it is the only one in the world that has a dead man as its leader: Kim Il Sung is the president of the country, despite having died in 1994.

This bizarre situation is a clear example of a totalitarian regime. In such regimes – Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany being other examples – every moment of an individual’s life is directed toward worshipping and obeying an all-powerful leader.

Religious doctrine is so rigid and outdated that many bizarre and totally irrational practices still exist within it. Nevertheless, the unbending faith among believers makes them adhere to these practices unquestioningly.

Society as a whole is also largely prepared to overlook unusual and irrational behavior committed for religious reasons, even if such behavior is dangerous.

Those who have faith should be happy, because they at least claim their beliefs are the key to bliss and everlasting happiness.

Yet, both in history and in the modern world, religious people have shown themselves to be angry, intolerant and violent rather than positive and peaceful. Instead of taking comfort in their own salvation, they seek to impose their beliefs on others, sometimes forcefully.

When we wish to gain new knowledge and broaden our minds, we can do so with relative ease. We are free to seek information in libraries and on the internet without fear of repression or surveillance.

We are able to do this thanks to the efforts of people who, in the past, strove to learn about the natural world even under threat of punishment. The names of the vast majority of history’s non-believers and freethinkers will, however, remain hidden to us. Living in more dangerous times, many concealed their true beliefs and thoughts out of fear.

Despite claims to the contrary, religion and science are diametrically opposed to each other. They both claim to provide answers to understanding the natural world, but of course only one can be right.

As knowledge of scientific principles has become widespread over the last few centuries, the role of religious belief has become increasingly marginal in many societies. Just as rainmakers in more primitive societies became unemployed when climatologists turned up, so is religion becoming increasingly redundant in the modern world.

Religious belief will probably never totally disappear. Despite the fact that its explanations for the natural world have been almost totally discredited in many societies, it continues to survive.

Religion is the product of a more primitive and childlike period in human history, when our ancestors had no idea why or how things like natural disasters or illness occurred. Religion provided explanations and soothed our ancestors’ fears of the unknown.