God Is Not Great, the controversial new book from writer Christopher Hitchens, is about to hit the stands. Here is a chance to read three excerpts from it and to watch him debating Zachary Karabell (Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence) and Jonathan Kirsch (A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization).
The debate, held three days ago at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, shows Hitchens at his most courteous and devastating. For Hitchens, there are four irreducible objections to religious faith: "that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." This would be tough enough to argue in godless Europe, but to do it in the US - as this debate testifies - ranks as, well, nothing short of blasphemous. Trust me, this is just the first round in what will be a very long, heavy fight. You know who my money's on. What do you think?
