Christopher Hitchens New Book and the San Diego Humanist Society

Last month, there was a lot of publicity surrounding Christopher Hitchens' new book called god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. There was even a special book tv event that had him and other authors showcase their arguments in their book and talk more about religion and culture. Being media savy as always, Hitchens won the crowd over with his wit but his arguments weren't impressive.

I decided to purchase a copy of the book and read it indepthly while looking over his over 50 footnotes. He basically creates the religion straw man in which he blames religion based on the human manifestations and errors of its adherents rather than the teachings and core beliefs themselves while at the same time arrogantly show the "superiority" of secular humanism and science.

Well it happened that one of the community events being held was by the San Diego Humanist Society to discuss the Book TV event that I just watched.

I came to the event thinking that the members of the San Diego Humanist Society probably already read Hitchens' book and had a strong grasp of its argument. Apparently they haven't even seen the book and they were totally clueless of what was going to be shown on Book TV.

After the meeting, as expected, the humanists praised Hitchens' tirade on religion and reiterated the atheist's argument against religion in general. When it was my turn to give some feedback, I told them I read Hitchens' book very carefully, went through its footnotes and found his argument flimsy at best.

Of course this stirred the hornet's nest and many outbursts resulted from it with a good discussion on atheism, Islam, and religion. The point I made was that one cannot put all religions into one basket. The typical arguments put out by atheists and secular humanists against religion don't really hold any weight with Islam.

Take for instance the argument that religion is anthetical to science. Islamic civilization has had a rich history of science and arts. I mentioned examples of algebra and other advanced mathematics. I also mentioned the first social theorist was Ibn Khaldun not August Comte.

After the whole discourse, I actually won the respect of many of its senior members and they wanted me to come back to future meetings. Some of them also admitted that they had a lot to learn about Islam.