The greatest strength of this book is how Hitchens is able to draw from personal experience.

Thus the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one.

Like much to do with Hitchens, its brevity is no indication of restraint as he levels the most devastating assault in the least amount of space while leaving nowhere for apologists to find solace. In his later life, he was best known as one of the ‘Four Horseman’ following the publication of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Miracles are not as miraculous as they first appear.The late Christopher Hitchens had a long and varied career as a political and social commentator and journalist known for his exceptional ability as a polemicist. Stories that didn’t fit the desired mold, such as the Gospel of Judas, were discarded. The original traditions were further corrupted when later religious leaders developed and strengthened their own doctrines. Also, the Jews’ flight from Egypt – a major event in the Bible – is not mentioned in any other historical record. The authors who collected and wrote down these oral tales mixed the various stories together, creating a historically inaccurate narrative.Ĭonsider, 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. Originally, religious stories were kept alive in mostly illiterate communities by word of mouth, a notoriously unreliable way to transfer information. Far from God creating mankind, it is we who in fact created him.įurther 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. Such selective inclusion of certain religious texts clearly demonstrates the Bible’s man-made design.

The Gospel of Judas obviously didn’t fit their narrative. The canonical gospels contained in the Bible were cherry-picked by the Church to reinforce their view of Jesus’s teachings. 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. In 2006, after having been hidden for years, the Gospel of Judas was published.

Hitchens god is not great