The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings For The Non-Believer - Overview

Overview

Atheism itself is just the absence of belief in gods. Well known for his own atheist book God Is Not Great, Hitchens treads some very heavily-traveled ground here in editing a compendium of atheist writings. For Hitchens, arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of god and those that demonstrate the ill effects of religion. “Religion” – he defines – “is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be determined”. He mentions great critics such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, who perhaps paradoxically regarded religion as an insult to god.

"An agnostic does not believe in god, or disbelieve in him", writes Hitchens. Non-belief is not quite unbelief, he explains. “One is continually told, as an unbeliever”, — he writes — “that it is old-fashioned to rail against the primitive stupidities and cruelties of religion because after all, in these enlightened times, the old superstitions have died away. Nine times out of ten, one will be told not of some dogma of religious certitude but of some instance of charitable or humanitarian work undertaken by a religious person. Of course, this says nothing about the belief system involved”. Hitchens points that if Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam succeeds in weaning young black men off narcotics, this would not alter the fact that the NoI is a racist crackpot organization. He reminds that Hamas – which publishes The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion on its website — won a reputation for its provision of social services. He challenges: which ethical statement made or which action performed by a believer could not have been made or performed by a non-believer?