God Is Not Great Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus God Is Not Great

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Zusammenfassung von God Is Not Great

Name: God Is Not Great
Rating: 3.9 (264 reviews)
Author: Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens

How Religion Poisons Everything

3.9 (264 Bewertungen)

16 Min.

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God Is Not Great
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Religious texts are clearly man-made, as their historical inaccuracies and selective accounts prove.

In 2006, after having been hidden for years, the Gospel of Judas was published.

This work was written around the same time as the four gospels of the New Testament and also describes the life of Jesus, but, like many other gospels, it was declared heretical by the Christian church and banned.

The canonical gospels contained in the Bible were cherry-picked by the Church to reinforce their view of Jesus’s teachings. The Gospel of Judas obviously didn’t fit their narrative.

Such selective inclusion of certain religious texts clearly demonstrates the Bible’s man-made design. Far from God creating mankind, it is we who in fact created him.

Further strong evidence for human (rather than divine) creation can be found in the religious texts that do appear in the Bible: they are full of historical inaccuracies and self-contradictions, and are based on faulty source material.

Originally, religious stories were kept alive in mostly illiterate communities by word of mouth, a notoriously unreliable way to transfer information. The authors who collected and wrote down these oral tales mixed the various stories together, creating a historically inaccurate narrative.

Consider, for example, the story of the birth of Jesus: it references various historical events as occurring at the time of his birth, but in reality these took place many years apart. Also, the Jews’ flight from Egypt – a major event in the Bible – is not mentioned in any other historical record.

The original traditions were further corrupted when later religious leaders developed and strengthened their own doctrines. Stories that didn’t fit the desired mold, such as the Gospel of Judas, were discarded.

Miracles are not as miraculous as they first appear.

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.

Far from being the guardians of morality, religions are positively immoral in their teachings.

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.

Like a dictatorship, religious belief is totalitarian.

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.

The way religions treat children demonstrates how blind faith encourages people to act irrationally and bizarrely.

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.

Religions are incapable of being tolerant – they must interfere in the lives of others.

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.

Though persecuted by religions, freethinkers have always been a driving force in the progression of knowledge.

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.

Religion and science are fundamentally incompatible.

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.

As long as religion exists, it will attempt to impose itself on the rest of society – it must be fought against.

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.

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Worum geht es in God Is Not Great?

God is Not Great traces the development of religious belief from the earliest, most primitive ages of humankind through to today. It attempts to explain the dangerous implications of religious thought and the reasons why faith still exists today. It also helps explain why scientific theory and religious belief can never be reconciled.

Wer God Is Not Great lesen sollte

Those who want to know how religions developed
Anyone who wants to understand the fight between religious and scientific thinking
Those who wish to see the negative aspects of religious belief

Über den Autor

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was an British author, journalist and broadcaster. He wrote for a number of publications including The New Statesman, The Nation and Vanity Fair and was a regular commentator on various issues.

He remained a popular but divisive figure on both the left and the right and was never afraid to take a stand on controversial issues.

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