[MD] Christopher Hitchens on the Essential Stupidity of Religion

[david buchanan]

Marsha said:
Finally!!! 
http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/christopher-hitchens-on-the-essential-stupidity-of-religion/16489/

dmb says:
Thanks for that. T'was fun to read. The cover story for the current (June 
25) issue of The Nation is titled "The New Atheists" It describes a wave of 
books, including the one written by Hitchens. I like to think I've been 
surfing this wave. Here's a little taste from The Nation...

"What began with publisher W.W. Norton taking a chance on a gutsy, 
hyperbolic and idiosyncratic attack on religion by a graduate student in 
neuroscience has grown into a remarkable intellectual wave. No fewer than 
five books by the New Atheists have appeared on bestseller lists in the past 
two years - Sam Harris's "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian 
Nation", Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell", Richard Dawkins's "The God 
Delusion" and now Christopher Hitchens's "God is Not Great". The scandalized 
media have both attacked and inflated the phenomenon. ...
...The success of the New Atheists may, however, reflect something 
significant among their audience. In the past generation in the United 
States, atheists, agnostics and secular humanists have been a timid minority 
- almost voiceless, often on the defensive, routinely derided, both warned 
against and ignored. ...it was as if they did not exist. This is what the 
polls are telling us: Virtually everyone in America believes in God. ...The 
great success of the New Atheists is to have reached them, both speaking to 
and for them. These writers are devoted, with sledgehammer force and angry 
urgency, to 'breaking the spell' cast by the religous ascendancy, to 
overcoming a situation in which every other area of life can be critically 
analyzed while admittedly irrational religious faith is made central to 
American life but exempted from serious discussion...."

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