4.0 out of 5 based on 2 reviews. – Customer review on 23/07/2007

Hitchens's approach here is primarily historical, tracing the major religions back to their origins and showing how they were plainly fabricated by divinely uninspired mammals.
Hitchens derives his central arguement from Ludwig Feuerbach's great insight - "God did not create man. Man created God, cobbling him together from a string of half-understood events and rumours".

Do Christians, Jews and Muslims imagine, he asks, that before Moses received the Ten Commandments, he thought murder and theft were good ideas?

Hitchens is less adept when dealing with the next major criticism: what about Stalin and Mao, the atheist mass murderers? Don't they puncture his thesis that "all major confrontations over the right to free thought, free speech, and free inquiry have taken the same form – of a religious attempt to assert the literal and limited mind over the ironic and inquiring one"? He redefines Stalinism and Maoism as political religions which I for one found slightly dissatisfying.

If there is a flaw to this book, it is that Hitchens's atheism sometimes takes on a misanthropic tone. He opens by quoting the 11th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam: "And do you think that unto such as you/ A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew/ God gave a secret?" He jokes at one point that this planet is "a prison and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilisations". It's hard not to think of the mysterious central character in Martin Amis's novel Night Train, who commits suicide because she concludes that this mediocre world can never match her own fabulousness.

4.0 out of 5 based on 2 reviews. – Customer review on 20/05/2008

Perfect Hitchens sums it all up nicely in this publication. A must read for any atheist or agnostic seeking clarification on all matters pertaining to the God Myth. Hitchens takes us on an historical step by step explanation of the creation of religion by man. He expels any doubts with clear and concise explanations, and examples of the evaluation of the various religions and all its obscure variants. Further more all his arguments are based on solid evidence and scientific facts. There can be no doubt that religion is a man made phenomenon and that its continued existence just perpetuates the lies and deceit that permeate from its very bogus original origins.