My Amazon Review

My Amazon review of Hitchens' "God is not Great"

Crusader For Reality, May 6, 2007
Reviewer:

I thoroughly appreciated Dawkins and Harris, and now Hitchens adds a crucial element to the argument which is wonderfully written and much worth reading. Though it seems there is no way to magically wake people up and coax them into being critical thinkers, these books challenge those moderates who read them carefully (forget the true believers) to really stop and ask themselves if they are being intellectually honest. I think the cognitive dissonance between what religion actually is versus what it pretends to be is building up to a breaking point in our society. Just today a video was released of a young woman being stoned to death in Iraq over a boyfriend she had with a different religious affiliation. On message boards Americans unanimously called the throng "barbaric animals", which of course they are. But I wonder how many of the people condemning the atrocity were strident worshippers of Jehovah, who explicitly commanded the same barbaric stonings to be carried out in his name for similar, if not cruder reasons. "But that was before Jesus", the Christian would say, as if somehow such an observation makes a difference.

If a man marries, then decides that he hates his wife, he can claim she wasn't a virgin when they were married. If her father can't produce the "tokens of her virginity" (bloody sheets), then the woman is to be stoned to death at her father's doorstep.

22:13-21 Deuteronomy