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Vorbestellen	Zweigstelle: 07., Urban-Loritz-Pl. 2a	Standorte: PR.AI Hitc / College 3g - Englisch / Regal 3g-1	Status: Entliehen	Frist: 17.07.2024	Vorbestellungen: 0

Christopher Hitchens has been hailed as one of the most brilliant journalists of our time' (London Observer). Here he makes the ultimate case against organised religion.With a detailed reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix. With chapters entitled Religion Kills, The New Testament Exceeds the Evil of the Old One, The Koran is Borrowed from Both Jewish and Christian Myths, and Is Religion Child Abuse? Hitchens argues for a more secular life based on science and reason rather than the myths of a man-made wish.Christopher Hitchens is the author of Letters to a Young Contrarian, and the bestseller No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family. A regular contributor to Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly and Slate, Hitchens also writes for The Weekly Standard, The National Reviewand The Independent. He was named one of the world's Top 100 Public Intellectuals' by Foreign Policyand Britain's Prospect.Publishers Weekly vol. 254 iss. 11 p. 52 (c) 03/12/2007 - Hitchens, one of our great political pugilists, delivers the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. The same contrarian spirit that makes him delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has God placed in the dock. And can he turn a phrase!: "monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a ... Mehr plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents." Hitchens's one-liners bear the marks of considerable sparring practice with believers. Yet few believers will recognize themselves as Hitchens associates all of them for all time with the worst of history's theocratic and inquisitional moments. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling believers' weaker arguments: that faith offers comfort (false comfort is none at all), or has provided a historical hedge against fascism (it mostly hasn't), or that "Eastern" religions are better (nope). The book's real strength is Hitchens's on-the-ground glimpses of religion's worst face in various war zones and isolated despotic regimes. But its weakness is its almost fanatical insistence that religion poisons "everything," which tips over into barely disguised misanthropy.