Indeed he isn’t.
Nor are the various religions that have grown up around his assorted guises.
In God Is Not Great, the late Christopher Hitchens sets out some of the reasons why. He does this very coherently and in a writing style that I found to be very engaging. There are sections where he launches an outright assault on religion and its practitioners, drawing from both personal experience and news reports as he does so. These passages will be objectionable to some and downright offensive to others but I found them to have both merit and validity.
No surprise in that, as I am already an unbeliever and have been for a long time, having first started questioning what I was told in Sunday school at around age 13. So much of what I was told either did not make sense or was downright horrific and at odds with what I considered to be decent behaviour.
God Is Not Great tackles the lack of both sense and horror in chapters that discuss topics such as killing in the name of religion, the damaging health implications of religious dogma and practices, biblical inconsistency and the lack of evidence for the miraculous. The content of other chapters is best explained by their title: Arguments from Design; The “New” Testament Exceeds the Evil of the “Old” One; The Koran is Borrowed from Both Jewish and Christian Myths; Does Religion Make People Behave Better?
There are many quotes from the book that struck me as worth posting. Far too many, in fact. Instead I recommend that you read this thought-provoking book, whether you believe or not, and close with this quote from the concluding chapter:
“Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard – or try to turn back – the measurable advances that we have made.”
God Is Not Great
Christopher Hitchens